WARSAW — Irena Sendler, a Polish Catholic social worker whose ingenuity and daring saved 2,500 Jewish children from extermination in the Holocaust, a feat that went largely unrecognized for about 60 years, died Monday. She was 98.
Sendler has been called the female Oskar Schindler, but she saved twice as many lives as the German industrialist who sheltered 1,200 of his Jewish workers. And unlike with Schindler, Sendler and her heroic actions were almost lost to history until four Kansas schoolgirls wrote a play about her nine years ago.
“One person can make a difference,” Megan Felt, one of the students who wrote the play, said Monday of Sendler.
Sendler was born Feb. 15, 1910, in Otwock, southeast of Warsaw. She was an only child whose parents raised her to care about those in need. She was especially influenced by her father, a doctor who defied anti-Semites by treating sick Jews during outbreaks of typhoid fever. He died of the disease when Sendler was 9.
She studied at Warsaw University and was a social worker when the German occupation of Poland began in 1939. In 1940, after the Nazis herded Jews into the ghetto, disease, especially typhoid, ran rampant. Sendler, imagining “the horror of life behind the walls,” obtained fake identification and passed herself off as a sanitary worker, allowed to bring in food, clothes and medicine.
By 1942, when the deadly intentions of the Nazis became clear, Sendler joined a Polish underground organization, Zegota, recruited 10 of her closest friends and began rescuing Jewish children.
They smuggled them out in boxes, suitcases, sacks and coffins, sedating babies to prevent their cries. Most of the children were taken into Catholic convents, orphanages and homes and given non-Jewish aliases.
In the hope that she could reunite them with their families later, Sendler recorded their true names on thin rolls of paper. She preserved the precious scraps in jars and buried them in a friend’s garden.
She was captured by the Nazis in 1943 and tortured but refused to say who her co-conspirators were.
During one session, her captors broke her feet and legs and she passed out. When she awoke, a Gestapo officer told her he had accepted a bribe from her comrades in the resistance to help her escape.
Felt said Sendler had begun her rescue efforts before she joined the organized resistance and helped a number of adults escape, including the man she later married.
“We think she saved about 500 people before she joined Zegota,” Felt said, which would mean that Sendler ultimately helped rescue about 3,000 Polish Jews.
When the war ended, Sendler unearthed the jars and began trying to return the children to their families. For the vast majority, there was no family left. Many of the children were adopted by Polish families, and others were sent to Israel.
In 1965, she was recognized by Yad Vashem, Israel’s Holocaust Authority, as a Righteous Gentile, an honor given to non-Jews who risked their lives to save Jews during the Nazi reign. Last year, Sendler was honored by the Polish Senate and nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize.
She downplayed the attention.
“Every child saved with my help is the justification of my existence on this Earth,” she said, “and not a title to glory.”
