International   

Saviour of 2,500 children

Irena Sendler

WARSAW: Irena Sendler, who saved some 2,500 Jewish children from the Nazi Holocaust, smuggling them out of the Warsaw Ghetto in baskets and trams and hiding them for safekeeping with Catholic families, convents and orphanages, is dead.

She was among the first to be honoured by Israel’s Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial as a Righteous Among Nations for her wartime heroism. She was 98.

Sendler was a 29-year-old social worker with the city’s welfare department when Germany invaded Poland in September 1939 to launch the Second World War. She continued social services work throughout the brutal Nazi occupation, when she masterminded the risky rescue operations.

Records show that Sendler’s team of about 20 people saved nearly 2,500 children from the Warsaw Ghetto between October 1940 and its final liquidation in April 1943, when the Nazis burned the ghetto, shooting the residents or sending them to death camps.

“Every child saved with my help and the help of all the wonderful secret messengers, who today are no longer living, is the justification of my existence on this earth, and not a title to glory,” Sendler said in 2007 in a letter to the Polish Senate after lawmakers honoured her efforts in 2007.

Under the pretext of inspecting the ghetto’s sanitary conditions during a typhoid outbreak, Sendler and her assistants ventured into the ghetto in search of children who could be smuggled out and given a chance of survival by living as Catholics. Babies and small children were smuggled out in ambulances and in trams, sometimes wrapped up as packages. Teenagers escaped by joining teams of workers forced to labour outside the ghetto. They were placed in families, orphanages, hospitals or convents.

In hopes of one day uniting the children with their families — most of whom perished in the Nazis’ death camps — Sendler wrote the children’s real names on slips of paper that she kept at home. — AP

Printer friendly page  
Send this article to Friends by E-Mail

Stories in this Section

Prescott advised Blair to “sack” Brown
I left no stone unturned, says Sharif
JVP rebels form party
Round one to media in Geo case as full Bench beats a retreat
Sudan cuts ties with Chad
Obama sets sights on McCain
Meet on removal of Nepal king
Rain threat to quake affected
Commonwealth revokes supension
Saviour of 2,500 children

Copyright © 2008, The Hindu. Republication or redissemination of the contents of this screen are expressly prohibited without the written consent of The Hindu