SCRIPT The great pretender
During WWII she rescued thousands of Jewish kids — by posing them as gentiles
Irena’s Children The Extraordinary Story of the Woman Who Saved 2,500 Children from the Warsaw Ghetto
During World War II, Irena Sendler saved more people than Oskar Schindler, smuggling some 2,500 Jewish children from Warsaw’s ghetto to safety. Each time, she escaped certain death, as the price for anyone who helped a Jew was summary execution.
Sendler, a Catholic, helped establish an underground network , ferrying children — in coffins, toolboxes, even under coats — to the homes of Polish gentile families.
“Irena’s Children” tells Sendler’s tale — including how she wrote each child’s real name on a scroll that she buried under an apple tree. The lists represented a hope that after the war had ended, she would be able to reunite the kids with their parents.
Sendler was working at the Citi- zens’ Social Aid Committee, helping unwed mothers, when the Germans invaded Poland in 1939.
As a form of resistance, she and her co-workers faked welfare files — listing made-up names to secure cash, food and clothing for Jewish families whose bank accounts were frozen. To ensure that the Germans did not try to visit these fictitious clans, she added details about contagious diseases such as typhus and cholera.
By the second year of the occupation, Germany began relocating Warsaw’s Jewish residents to one of the city’s poorest areas — with families crammed into small apartments, six or seven people to a room. Food rations were reduced to 200 calories a day — if you could even afford to buy food. The ghetto was sealed off with bricks, barbed wire and armed guards in November 1940, confining 400,000 Jews behind its walls.
But Sendler had access to the ghetto due to her work. So she and a few cohorts began secretly removing the kids and resettling them with gentile families. Birth certificates were forged, reinventing Jewish children as Aryans.
“Whena Christian child died in [an] orphanage, the key thing was to make sure that the death was never reported,” writes Mazzeo. “The name and registry number were passed along instead, to give a new identity . . . to a Jewish foundling.”
Elzbieta Ficowska was smuggled out in a carpenter’s toolbox when she was just 6 months old. Her only keepsake from her mother is a small silver spoon she now refers to as her “dowry and birth certificate.”
Ficowska was one of many infants Sendler thought it safer to baptize. When she told the baby’s grandfather this, he broke down crying in the street. A few days later, a package arrived: a lace christening gown and crucifix. There was no note.
“The message was clear,” writes Mazzeo. “It was a family’s goodbye to a desperately loved child.”
In October 1943, the Germans stormed Sendler’s apartment. She was arrested, taken to prison and sentenced to death. But on the day of her planned execution, the underground Polish Council to Aid Jews bribed an officer to let her go. She spent the rest of the war in hiding.
After it was all over, Sendler tried to find the buried names, with no luck. The city was so destroyed, says Mazzeo, “it was hard to know what had been your back yard.” Instead, Sendler had to remember the children’s names so she could house them with family abroad.
Devastatingly, 98 percent of the rescued children’s parents died in the Treblinka concentration camp.
Although Sendler was recognized as Righteous Among the Nations by the official Holocaust memorial organization Yad Vashem in 1965, she remained persona non grata to the Polish Communist government. She spent the rest of her life in Poland, raising her three children.
“While most of the parents died, their children lived, and generations are exponential,” says Mazzeo. “She thought she was saving one life, but in fact she was saving all of these people that didn’t even exist yet.”