The German administration of occupied Warsaw had, with a kind of bureaucratic precision, designated 400,000 Jewish men, women, and children to be sealed inside a walled ghetto. Inside those walls, disease and starvation were killing 5,000 people per month by 1942. And then the deportations began — to a camp called Treblinka, from which no one returned.
Irena Sendler was a thirty-two-year-old Polish Catholic social worker with a permit to enter the Warsaw Ghetto under the pretext of conducting sanitation inspections. She was part of Żegota, the Polish Council to Aid Jews, which operated under sentence of death — not just for members who were caught, but for any member of a Jew-harboring household.
She used a codename: Jolanta.
The Method
The problem Sendler and her network faced was both logistical and moral. Children could be smuggled out relatively more easily than adults — they could be sedated and hidden in boxes, in the bottom of toolboxes, beneath bundles of clothing, inside suitcases with false bottoms. A carpenter's friend built a specially large toolbox with a ventilated compartment. The garbage trucks that collected waste from the Ghetto could conceal children under piles of refuse.
Older children were coached to walk through checkpoints posing as Polish children — they were given false identity papers, new names, taught to recite Catholic prayers in case they were questioned. The tram that ran through the Ghetto could sometimes be used to move a child hidden under a coat.
But the deeper problem was this: if the war ended and the parents survived, how would these children — now living as Poles with new names, placed in convents and orphanages and with foster families across Warsaw — ever be reunited with their families?
Sendler's solution was meticulous and desperate. She recorded every expelled child's real Jewish name and their new false identity on thin tissue paper. She placed these records in glass jars. And she buried the jars under an apple tree in the garden of her friend and colleague Jadwiga Piotrowska, at a house on a quiet Warsaw street.
What the Gestapo Did
The Gestapo arrested Irena Sendler on October 20, 1943. They had been informed. They searched her house and found lists — though not the jars. At Gestapo headquarters at Szucha Avenue, they interrogated her through the night and then the following day. They broke both of her legs and both of her feet.
She revealed no names.
She was sentenced to death. On the morning of her execution, her Żegota contact — a man who appeared at Gestapo headquarters dressed as a German officer — produced forged documents and a bribe. She was listed in official German records as executed. In reality, she was released, hidden, and spent the rest of the war in hiding.
She walked on crutches for the rest of her life.
What the Jars Contained
After the war ended, Sendler dug up the jars. The tissue paper inside listed 2,500 names — 2,500 children she had brought out, or helped bring out, or arranged to have brought out. She spent years attempting to reunite children with surviving family members.
She found almost no one. Of the 2,500 families from which these children had come, fewer than a hundred parents or siblings had survived. The rest had been killed at Treblinka.
The children she saved grew up as Poles, as Catholics in many cases, without knowing their own names or origins. Some found out decades later. Some never did. The jars had done their work, but the families they were meant to reunite no longer existed.
In 2007, Irena Sendler was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize. She did not win. Al Gore received the prize that year for his climate change advocacy. She died in 2008, age 98, in Warsaw. The Polish government awarded her the Order of the White Eagle, the nation's highest honor.
She had said, near the end of her life: "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 qualms of conscience that I did so little."
Sources & Further Reading
Anna Mieszkowska, "Irena Sendler: Mother of the Children of the Holocaust" (Praeger, 2011); Żegota records, Jewish Historical Institute, Warsaw; Yad Vashem testimonies.
