Polish 97-year old woman who saved 2,500 children in WW2.

Poland puts 97-year-old forward for Nobel prize
· Social worker smuggled Jews out of Warsaw

Kate Connolly in Berlin
Thursday March 15, 2007
The Guardian


Irena Sendlerowa was named a national hero by Poland yesterday for her secret work in the Warsaw ghetto. She smuggled children out through sewers and in suitcases and boxes. Photograph: Stach Antkowiak/AFP

A Polish social worker who saved 2,500 Jewish babies and children from the Nazi death camps was yesterday honoured as a national hero by the Polish parliament.
Irena Sendlerowa, 97, who has been nominated for this year's Nobel peace prize, changed the identity of the children she rescued from the Warsaw ghetto in 1942 and 1943 and placed them with Polish families.

As a member of Zegota, a secret organisation set up by the Polish government in exile in London in the second world war to rescue Polish Jews, she organised a small group of social workers to smuggle the children to safety. She worked in the Warsaw health department and had permission to enter the ghetto, which had been set up in November 1940 to segregate the city's 380,000 Jews.


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She and her team smuggled the children out by variously hiding them in ambulances, taking them through the sewer pipes or other underground passageways, wheeling them out on a trolley in suitcases or boxes or taking them out through the old courtyard which led to the non-Jewish areas.
She noted the names of the children on cigarette papers, twice for security, and sealed them in two glass bottles, which she buried in a colleague's garden.

After the war the bottles were dug up and the lists handed to Jewish representatives. Attempts were made to reunite the children with their families but most of them had perished in concentration camps.

Unlike the German industrialist Oskar Schindler, who saved more than 1,000 Jews by employing them at his Krakow factory and is widely recognised thanks to an award-winning book and film, Mrs Sendlerowa's story remains relatively unknown. A few years ago it was picked up in America by a group of Kansas school children who wrote a play about it, Life in a Jar.

Yesterday at a special session in Poland's upper house of parliament, members unanimously approved the resolution to honour Mrs Sendlerowa for rescuing "the most defenceless victims of the Nazi ideology - the Jewish children". President Lech Kaczynski said she was a "great hero who can be justly named for the Nobel peace prize".

He added: "She deserves great respect from our whole nation."

But Mrs Sendlerowa, who is in a Warsaw nursing home, insisted she did nothing special.

In an interview she said: "I was brought up to believe that a person must be rescued when drowning, regardless of religion and nationality."

"The term 'hero' irritates me greatly. The opposite is true. I continue to have pangs of conscience that I did so little."

She was arrested in October 1943 and taken to Gestapo headquarters where she was beaten. Her legs and feet were broken and she was then driven away to be executed. But a rucksack of dollars paid by Zegota secured her release. She was knocked unconscious and left by the roadside. She still has to use crutches today as a result of her injuries.

One of the "names in a jar" was Michal Glowinski, now a professor of literature. "I think about her the way you think of someone you owe your life to," he said.

Elzbieta Ficowska was smuggled out of the ghetto by Mrs Sendlerowa in a toolbox on a lorry when she was just five months old.

"In the face of today's indifference, the example of Irena Sendlerowa is very important. Irena Sendlerowa is like a third mother to me and many rescued children," she said, referring also to her real mother and her Polish foster mother.

Due to the Communist regime's suppression of history and its encouragement of anti-semitism, few Poles were aware of Zegota's work until a marble plaque dedicated to the organisation was unveiled near the former Warsaw Ghetto in 1995.