Smuggling Children out of the Ghetto: Holocaust Remembrance Day
Irena SendlerThough I rarely post stories emailed in this fashion because they often don't report the whole truth, this one does. The story, as reported on TruthorFiction.com,
Died: May 12, 2008 (aged 98)
Warsaw, Poland
During WWII, Irena, got permission to work in the Warsaw ghetto, as a Plumbing/Sewer specialist. She had an ulterior motive.
Irena smuggled Jewish infants out in the bottom of the tool box she carried. She also carried a burlap sack in the back of her truck, for larger kids.
Irena kept a dog in the back that she trained to bark when the Nazi soldiers let her in and out of the ghetto. The soldiers, of course, wanted nothing to do with the dog and the barking covered the kids/infants noises.
During her time of doing this, she managed to smuggle out and save 2500 kids/infants.
Ultimately, she was caught, however, and the Nazi's broke both of her legs and arms and beat her severely.
Irena kept a record of the names of all the kids she had smuggled out, in a glass jar that she buried under a tree in her back yard.
After the war, she tried to locate any parents that may have survived and tried to reunite the family. Most had been gassed. Those kids she helped got placed into foster family homes or adopted.
In 2007 Irena was up for the Nobel Peace Prize. She was not selected. http://www.irenasendler.com/nobel.asp [SM edit:
http://www.irenasendler.org/nobel.asp]
Al Gore won, for a slide show on Global Warming.
Later another politician, Barack Hussein Obama, won for his work as a community organizer for ACORN.
In MEMORIAM - 65 YEARS LATER
I'm doing my small part by forwarding this message. I hope you'll consider doing the same.
It is now more than 65 years since the Second World War in Europe ended.
This e-mail is being sent as a memorial chain, in memory of the six million Jews, 20 million Russians, 10 million Christians and 1,900 Catholic priests who were murdered, massacred, raped, burned, starved and humiliated!
The story of Irena Sendler is true. According to a website set up in her honor at www.irenasendler.org, she was not widely known until a series of events that started in Kansas in the U.S.A. in 1999.
A teacher in a rural Kansas town discovered a short magazine article that claimed that a Polish woman saved 2,500 children from the Warsaw Ghetto in 1942 and 1943. He gave the story to four high school students and asked them to check it out. He said he'd never heard of the woman and speculated that the article may have gotten the facts wrong.
The students looked into the story and discovered that Irena Sendler was real, her story was accurate, and that she was still alive and living in Poland.
Sendler was a Catholic social worker during the 1940s who saw the handwriting on the wall for the Jews of Poland. She became concerned for the children in the Warsaw Ghetto, which was one of the largest ghettos of Jews established by the Nazis. The population of the Warsaw Ghetto dropped from 450,000 to about 70,000 people because of starvation, sickness, and tens of thousands of Jews deported to concentration camps and death.
Sendler convinced Jewish parents that their children were facing death either in the Ghetto or in concentration camps and offered to rescue them. She smuggled the children out of the Warsaw Ghetto and hid them in the homes of Poles who adopted them or in orphanages or convents. She made lists of the children's names and family connections and hid them in jars in her garden so that someday she could find the children and tell them who they were.
Sendler was eventually discovered, arrested, tortured, and imprisoned by the Nazis. The Polish underground bribed a guard to let her escape and she spent the rest of the war in hiding.
The students in Kansas developed a performance titled Life In a Jar that tells the story of Irena Sendler. Those performances and the publicity that resulted have thrust the news about Irena Sendler around the world.
Here is the Glenn Beck YouTube video mentioned in the article:
In 1965, Irene Sendler was recognized by Yad Vashem as "Righteous Among the Nations" for her heroism for the Jewish people, and you can also read about her story there.
