In this time of pandemic we celebrate the helpers and the heroes, some of whom forfeit their lives. During World War II, many Holocaust heroes were unsung; they died during the war or lived their lives quietly afterward. One such hero was Irena Sendler, a Polish Catholic social worker. Between and , Sendler and her network of 10 compatriots rescued 2, Jewish children from the Warsaw ghetto.
Disguised as an infection-control nurse, Sendler knocked on doors in the ghetto, asking parents and grandparents to give up their children and grandchildren so that she could smuggle them out. Each child was given a new Polish name and forged identity papers and hidden in foster homes, orphanages, or convents.
Sendler insisted that lists of the children be kept, documenting their Jewish and Polish names, so that after the war they would know their original identities. She hid the lists in milk jars that were buried in the backyard of one of her co-conspirators. They were harassed, interrogated, imprisoned, and even executed. Sendler and others who rescued Jews during the war kept silent.
Almost no one knew of Sendler and her heroism. She would have remained an unsung hero were it not for three teenage American girls who discovered her forgotten story 60 years later. Three teenagers from rural Kansas helped crack open the silence about the Holocaust in Poland. My first brush with this story came in the winter of , in my Middlebury, Vermont, pediatric office, while going through my mail.
This was before the electronic health record, and I daily triaged a prodigious stack of paper. Everything had about three seconds to be kept, filed, recycled, or thrown away. I am a member of the U. Each year I send a contribution, and they send me a calendar highlighting 12 monthly Holocaust heroes. As I quickly flipped through, I was brought up short by the November entry. It was the photo that stopped meβa young Irena Sendler, twenty-nine years old, who looked a lot like my niece.
