lzbieta Ficowska was just five months old when she was placed in a carpenters box and

smuggled out of the Warsaw Ghetto. She was placed with a Polish family on the Aryan side of
the wall, and the young woman who carried her out of the Ghetto added tiny little Elzbietas
name, parents names and new address to a piece of tissue paper, on which were written the
details of other children she had smuggled out. The jar was later buried under an apple tree in
the back yard of a friends home.
How could one person save 2,500 children? The young woman was 29-year-old Irena
Sendler, a Polish Catholic social worker who saved 2,500 Jewish children from the Nazis. Unlike
the names in the jar, which were unearthed soon after the Nazis defeat, Irenas story and that of
her fellow rescuers remained buried for nearly sixty years. That began to change in 1999, when
four students at rural Uniontown High School in Kansas began researching possible projects for
the National History Day competition. The students, Megan Stewart, Elizabeth Cambers,
Jessica Shelton and Sabrina Coons, were intrigued by a sentence their teacher, Norman
Conrad, showed them in an article from US News and World Report, which stated simply, Irena
Sendler saved 2,500 children from the Warsaw Ghetto in 194243.
Both teacher and students were convinced that it must have been a typo. How could one person
save 2,500 children from the walled and heavily guarded Ghetto? They assumed that the article
had meant to say 250.
When you look at her, Conrad told an interviewer, you cant imagine how she could walk past
the Nazi guards, carrying a child in a gunny sack. How did she do it?
Irena Sendler (Sendlerowa) was just 411 tall, her lively, intelligent black eyes set in a round,
smiling face. She was beautiful, and in taped interviews one can see a warm yet quietly
determined individual. Still, her appearance more closely resembled a favorite doll than a
fearless resistance leader. How did she find the courage to smuggle out living, breathing (and
sometimes crying) Jewish children past vicious, heavily armed guards?
It was a question that came up early on in the students research, as they began to realize that
there had been no typo in the original articleIrena had indeed saved 2,500 children. Yet the
students never expected to be able to ask Irena that question. They assumed that Irena, who
was born in 1910 and had endured torture at the hands of the Gestapo during the war, must

have passed away. They wanted to know where she was buried. They were thrilled to discover
that she was still alive!
The girls, who by that time had written a ten-minute play, Life in a Jar, depicting Irenas rescue
efforts, decided to write to Irena, who was living with relatives in a tiny apartment in Warsaw.
They mentioned their play, which had won the state history contest and would be performed at
the National History Day competition. They asked for more details about her life, and they
asked: where did she find the courage?
If a man is drowning, one must help him My parents taught me, Irena wrote back, that if a
man is drowning, it is irrelevant what is his religion or nationality. One must help him. Irena was
born in Warsaw on February 15, 1910, but spent most of her youth in Otwock, a town with a
vibrant Jewish community. At the end of World War I a typhus epidemic broke out, and Irenas
father, Dr. Stanislaw Krzyzanowski, devoted himself to caring for impoverished Jews suffering
from the disease. He contracted typhus from his patients and passed away. Irena was just
seven years old. She and her mother eventually returned to Warsaw, where Irena completed
school and enrolled in Warsaw University.
Irena posing as a nurse to enter the ghetto
In those days, there were strict rules dictating the separation of Jewish and non-Jewish
students, who were not allowed to sit together in or out of class. Irena refused to obey these
rules, and was suspended for one year. She managed to complete her studies, and by
September 1939, when the Nazis invaded Poland, she was a social worker employed by the
Warsaw Welfare Department.
Those who knew her say that it was always Irenas nature to help. Though she lost her father at
an early age, his dedication to othersreinforced by her mothers example and wordsmade a
deep impression on her. Though still young, she already had a history of sacrifice on behalf of
others, and of defying rising anti-Semitism to reach out to and stand up for Jews.
Almost as soon as the Nazi occupation began, Irena began making forged documents for
Jewish friends. She also offered food and shelter to the increasingly persecuted Jewish
population. Then, in 1940, she witnessed the imprisonment of nearly 500,000 Jews in the
Warsaw Ghettoan area the size of New Yorks Central Park. She continued making false
documents for those who escaped or had gone into hiding and avoided the Ghetto. Between

1939 and 1942 Irena, with the assistance of a few trusted friends, forged over 3,000 documents
to save Jewish families. In the fall of 1942 two Polish women, Zofia Kossak-Szczucka and
Wanda Krahelska-Filipowicz, founded Zegotathe Council for Aid to Jews in Occupied Poland,
a branch of the Polish underground. The members of Zegota asked Irena to head the Childrens
Department. She readily agreed. I lost no time in reflecting [on the danger], she later
explained, knowing that I and my heart had to be there, had to be a part of the rescue. With
the assistance of other social workers, as many as 25 at one time, Irena began rescuing the
children of the Ghetto. By that time, she was an administrator in the Welfare Department. Taking
advantage of both her official position and the Germans paranoia of germs, she would go into
the Ghetto under the ruse of wanting to stop the spread of disease beyond the ghetto walls.
Officially, she was examining Jews for signs of contagious diseases. In reality, she was looking
for children to save. At first, Irena and her helpers took orphans living on the streets of the
Ghetto. Later, she would meet with parents and ask them to let her take their children out. Irena
always made it clear to the families, convents and orphanages who took in children that these
children were to be returned to their families after the war. She kept her detailed lists for this
reasonso that families could be reunited. There were two common routes used to smuggle
the children out, through two buildings that straddled the border between the Ghetto and the
rest of Warsaw. One building was an old courthouse, the other was a church. Children old
enough to be taught some basic Catholic prayers would be sneaked into the church from the
Jewish side. Once inside, they would remove their yellow stars and take on their new identities
as Polish Catholic children. They would exit through the front door of the church, which was
guarded by Nazi soldiers who questioned them when they came out. The Nazis used various
tricks to try to catch Jews escaping this way. Irena and her helpers trained the children well
they were never caught coming out of the church with Jewish children. Younger children could
not be rescued through the buildings. Instead, Irena would place them in gunny sacks or
toolboxes and carry them out of the Ghetto, or she would hide them under potatoes in a cart.
Once, she took a child out concealed in a coffin. On other occasions, she was able to legally
take seriously ill children out of the Ghetto in an ambulance. At other times, the ambulance was
used to conceal healthy children. She had the assistance of the ambulance driver and of a dog.
When the children would start to whimper, and she feared detection, she would hit her dog on
his paw, and he would begin to bark. This set off a chain reaction among the Nazis dogs, and
chaos would erupt. At that point, the Nazis would let her pass.

Once on the other side, she would take the children to the home of her friends, the Piotrowski
family, where the children would change their clothing, and have a chance to eat and rest after
their dangerous journey. It was also at the Piotrowski home that Irena would secretly bury her
lists of names, under an apple tree in their backyard. The Piotrowskis lived across the street
from a German barrack. Oftentimes the children would also stay by another friend, Maria
Kukulska, until they could be safely moved to what would be their home for the remainder of the
war. The people who helped Irena, twenty-four women and one man, all took tremendous risks.
There were even ten who alternated entering the Ghetto with her, but it was Irena herself who
entered the Ghetto day after day for eighteen monthsand walked out each time with a child.
Her life was in constant danger. Ultimately, the Nazis began to suspect her. She changed her
address numerous times, but continued her work. Her careful list-making almost betrayed
her.The names of the saved children, I wrote down on thin tissue paper. There were two
identical lists in two bottles, recalled Irena. When I once had the list at home, that same night
the Gestapo arrived. Fortunately, one of my liaison girls demonstrated her presence of mind and
hid the list in her underwear. After that, for safety reasons, I never kept the lists at home.
Tragically, Irena was arrested by the Germans on October 20, 1943five months after the
destruction of the Warsaw Ghetto. Her address had been revealed by an informer.
Her address had been revealed by an informer Irena was tortured and beaten for several
days; one leg and one foot were fractured. She refused to reveal the whereabouts of the
children, or the names of anyone in the Resistance. She was scheduled to be executed, but
members of Zegota found out and bribed a guard to instead leave her in the woods, where they
found and rescued her. Her name was printed on public lists of those who had been shot by the
Gestapo, and she spent the rest of the war in hiding.
After the war, she worked to track down the children and reunite them with relatives, but nearly
all of them were by then orphans. Copies were made of the lists and given to officers of Zegota,
who helped Irena search, but few relatives were ever found. Only one percent of the Jews of the
Warsaw Ghetto survived the war.
Irena in 2007
Irena would have likely remained unknown to most of the world if not for the students from
Kansas. After winning the state history competition in early 2000, they began performing the
play in communities and schools around Kansas, and the media began to pick up on the story of

this female Schindler. Uniontown proclaimed an Irena Sendler Day, and other towns followed
suit.
It was around this time that two very significant things happenedfor both them and Irena. They
found out not only that Irena was alive and how to write to her; they also found a university
student fluent in Polish who agreed to translate Irenas letters to them. Then, in January 2001,
they performed the play in Kansas City, where a local businessman suggested that they should
meet Irena. They said that they were planning it and saving money. He asked them, How old is
she now? When they answered that she was already 91, he used his contacts to raise the
moneyin just one dayfor the students and their teacher, Norman Conrad, to fly to Poland to
meet Irena. Normans wife and several students parents joined the trip.
You have changed the world In Poland the students visited Irena, performed the play and met
with government officials. National and international media covered their visit, breaking nearly
sixty years of silence. That first visit took place in May 2001, and since then, Holocaust
education in Poland has changed dramatically. Other Polish rescuers came forward with their
stories. Yet it was not for her own sake that Irena was so pleased with the recognition. Rather, it
was the fact that the work of Zegota was finally being recognized, and even more, for the way in
which hearing about Zegota has changed Polish perceptions of their own history. By giving
Poles a hero, the students have made it possible to discuss both the good and the evil of those
years. Irenas story, the play, and some of the 4,000 pages of primary source material collected
by the students about Irena are being used in schools and colleges in Poland and America. And
for the past six years, the Irena Sendler Award has been encouraging and awarding projects
aimed at teaching tolerance. Each year, an outstanding teacher in America and in Poland are
chosen. Irenas last words to the students, on May 3, 2008, were, You have changed Poland,
you have changed the United States, you have changed the world. I love you very, very much.