The Names in the Jar

Irena Sendler was a social worker in Warsaw, the capital of Poland. She was small, determined and, as a child, had been taught by her father, a doctor, that if you see someone drowning, you must try to save them, whether or not you can swim.

In September 1939, Nazi Germany invaded Poland. A year later, the occupying German authorities forced Warsaw's Jewish population into a small, walled-off area of the city: the Warsaw Ghetto.

Behind the wall

More than 400,000 people were crammed into the ghetto. There was almost no food and no medicine. Typhus spread through the overcrowded streets. Thousands died of hunger and disease every month.

Irena worked for the city's social welfare department. Using a pass meant for workers controlling contagious disease, she was able to enter the ghetto. She brought in food, medicine and clothing. She also wore an armband with the Star of David inside the walls, as a sign of solidarity with the people imprisoned there.

What she saw convinced her that the people inside were not simply being starved. They were going to be killed.

In the summer of 1942, the Germans began the mass deportation of the ghetto's inhabitants to the Treblinka extermination camp. Over the following weeks, hundreds of thousands of people were sent to their deaths.

Getting the children out

Irena joined Żegota, the Council to Aid Jews, an underground organisation of the Polish resistance. She became head of its children's department.

With a network of trusted helpers, mostly women, she helped to smuggle Jewish children out of the ghetto. The methods described by her biographers sound almost unbelievable. Babies were carried out hidden in boxes, sacks or toolboxes. Older children were led through the sewers, or through buildings that had entrances on both sides of the ghetto wall, such as the old courthouse. Some were hidden in ambulances, under stretchers. A driver is said to have brought a dog, trained to bark at the German guards and drown out the sound of crying children.

The hardest part, Irena said later, was persuading parents to give up their children. She could not promise them anything. Parents had to choose between keeping their child close or handing them to a stranger, with only a hope that they would live.

New names

Once outside, the children were given false Polish names and false papers. They were placed with Polish families, in convents, or in orphanages, where they had to learn Christian prayers and keep their true identity secret. A single slip could mean death for the child and for everyone who was hiding them. Helping Jews in occupied Poland was punishable by death.

Irena knew that one day, if they survived, these children would need to know who they really were. So she kept a record. On thin slips of paper, in code, she wrote each child's real name and their new identity. She put the lists into glass jars and buried them under an apple tree in a friend's garden.

Arrest

In October 1943, the Gestapo arrested her. She was imprisoned and interrogated, and according to her own later accounts, she was beaten so badly that her legs and feet were broken. She refused to give up the names of her helpers or the children.

She was sentenced to death. But on the way to her execution, a guard who had been bribed by Żegota let her escape. Her name appeared on lists of the executed. She spent the rest of the war in hiding, under a false name, and continued her work.

After the war

When the war ended, Irena dug up the jars. She and her colleagues tried to reunite the children with their families. Tragically, almost all of the parents had been murdered. Many of the children were taken to Jewish orphanages, and some later emigrated to Israel.

The number of children saved by Irena Sendler's network is most often given as about 2,500. Historians note that the exact number is uncertain, and that she always stressed that it was the work of many people.

Rediscovered

Under Poland's communist government after the war, her wartime work went largely unrecognised. In 1965, Yad Vashem in Israel honoured her as one of the Righteous Among the Nations, a title for non-Jews who risked their lives to save Jews during the Holocaust.

Her story became widely known only in 1999, when a group of schoolgirls in Kansas, in the United States, found a short mention of her while working on a history project. They wrote a play about her called Life in a Jar, and performed it hundreds of times. They even travelled to Warsaw to meet her.

Irena Sendler died in 2008, at the age of 98. She did not like being called a hero. She said she regretted that she had not been able to do more.

Want to read more?

Anna Mieszkowska's biography is based on long conversations with Irena Sendler herself. Tilar J. Mazzeo's Irena's Children tells the story for a general reader. Yad Vashem's online database of the Righteous Among the Nations records her and many of her helpers.