Watch Full Movie "The Courageous Heart Of Irena Sendler Here
Irena Sendler bátor szíve from
Merenyi Zoltan on
Vimeo.
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Irena Sendler: In the Name of Their Mothers premiered May 2011.
Check Local Listings to see when it's airing on your local PBS station.
"I sit here as a testament to those people who were committed to saving a Jewish child's life."
— William Donat
Irena Sandler In the Name of Their Mothers is the story of a group of
young Polish women, who outfoxed the Nazis during World War II and
saved the lives of thousands of Jewish children.
Julien Bryan Collection, USHMM
A Polish mother and child in the aftermath of the bombing of Warsaw, 1939.
Irena Sendler, a petite social worker, was not yet thirty years old
when Nazi tanks rolled into Warsaw in September of 1939. When the
city's Jews were imprisoned behind a ghetto wall without food or
medicine, she appealed to her closest friends and colleagues, mostly
young women, some barely out of their teens. Together, they smuggled
aid in and smuggled Jewish orphans out of the ghetto by hiding infants
on trams and garbage wagons and leading older children out through
secret passageways and the city’s sewers. Catholic birth certificates
and identity papers were forged and signed by priests and high ranking
officials in the Social Services Department so that the children could
be taken from safe houses in Warsaw to orphanages and convents in the
surrounding countryside.
The scheme was fraught with danger. The city was crawling with
ruthless blackmailers, and the Gestapo were constantly on the look out
for Jews who had escaped from the ghetto. "You are not Rachel but Roma.
You are not Isaac but Jacek. Repeat it ten times, a hundred, even a
thousand times," says Irena, who knew that any child on the street could
be stopped and interrogated. If he was unable to recite a Catholic
prayer he could be killed.
Magda Rusinek tells us how she taught the children "little prayers
that every child knows in Polish. I would wake them up during the night
to say the prayer," says the Sendler collaborator who had joined the
Polish Resistance as a teenager. "And then I had to teach them how to
behave in a church, a Christian Church."
"They treated me like their own child," says Poitr Zettinger,
recalling how the sisters would warn him when the Gestapo came to the
convent. "They would tell me when I should hide so I'd run up to the
attic. I'd hide in a cupboard there." William Donat, a New York
businessman, describes the conflicts inherent in the extraordinary
situation. "I was baptized and I was converted and, became a very, very
strong Catholic. I was praying every day for perhaps a little more food
and for Jesus to forgive me for the terrible sin that I had been born a
Jew."
Sendler and her cohorts kept meticulous records of the children's
Jewish names so that they could be reunited with their parents after the
war. Donat was one of the few whose parents survived.
2B Productions
Irena Sendler at age 95 in Warsaw.
In 1942, as conditions worsened and thousands of Jews were rounded up
daily and sent to die at the Treblinka death camp, less than hour
outside Warsaw, Sendler and her cohorts began to appeal to Jewish
parents to let their children go. Sixty years later, Irena still has
nightmares about the encounters. "Those scenes over whether to give a
child away were heart-rending. Sometimes, they wouldn't give me the
child. Their first question was, 'What guarantee is there that the
child will live?' I said, 'None. I don't even know if I will get out
of the ghetto alive today."
Read More Here
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Irena Sendler
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 which 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. Al Gore won, for a slide show on Global Warming.
Later another politician, Barack 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 67 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!
