My Turn

Life in a Jar

By Norman Conard

Kansas students carry out a Holocaust investigation that is making headlines.

NEA Magazine, 2 September 2002

www.nea.org

In the fall of 1999, I encouraged four of my students to work on a project that would demonstrate our classroom motto, "He who changes one person, changes the world entire."

They came across an old magazine article about a woman named Irena Sendler who saved 2,500 children from the Warsaw Ghetto. Sendler, a non-Jewish social worker, went into the Ghetto and talked Jewish parents into giving her their children, telling them that otherwise, they would all die. She smuggled the children past the Nazi guards and got them adopted into Polish homes.

Sendler put lists of the children's names in jars and buried them in her garden so that someday she could find the children and tell them their real identities. The Nazis captured her and beat her, but the under-ground bribed a guard to let her go. After the war, she dug up the jars.

My students wrote a play telling this story called Life in a Jar. They performed for many groups in our community, which has little diversity-there are no Jewish students in our school district.

Searching for Irena's final resting place, they discovered that she was still alive, living in poverty in Warsaw. They started taking a jar to performances to collect money for Irena, which they sent to her through a bank in Warsaw.

The students began corresponding with Irena, assisted by a local Polish student who translated the letters. "Your work continues the effort I started over 50 years ago," Irena wrote.

The students and their play have received national publicity. I have watched the emotion pour from the audience when they perform. They have brought our class motto to life.

I chose some of these students for this project because of their own difficult life situations. One girl was abandoned by her parents at the age of seven. Another has a mother with cancer. A third student turned out to be a great choice, although I didn't know it then. She found out her great-grandmother was Jewish and in a death camp, but survived.

After one show, a Jewish educator and businessman offered to raise the money to send the students to Poland to meet Irena, who was then 91 and in poor health. So in May 2001, we traveled to Warsaw to meet the rescuer and some of the thousands of children she saved.

We landed in a frenzy of media attention in the wake of a two-page story in Poland's largest daily paper. The Polish press dubbed the girls "The Sendlerova Quartet."

The journey took on special significance because of a recently published book about a town where Polish residents brutally killed their Jewish neighbors in 1941. This book caused a painful national debate. Our girls arrived at a time when Poland needed to hear about a Polish heroine. Irena Sendler was impacting Poland, even in her 90s, through four students from Kansas.

When the girls met Irena, she told us stories, cried with us, and laughed with us. She keeps a picture of the four girls by her bedside. She says they are her heroes.

We also met a woman who was rescued by Irena at five months. She showed us a silver spoon with her date of birth and name on it. Her mother put the spoon in her crib just before a rescuer took her away. The parents died at Treblinka.

We saw the prison where Irena was tortured and the garden where she buried the jars. We met a woman leaning over the fence who had hidden three Jews in her home.

I will always remember the rainy day when we left Warsaw and Irena, waving from her window, tears rolling down her cheeks.

We went to Poland to understand this lady's story, but we left still not able to imagine the courage it took for her and others to "walk into the valley of death" and return "with the children of life."

Our team has grown to 15 members, doing more research, trying to keep up with our correspondence, and working on the play. We are booked months in advance and have been invited to perform at the Krakow Festival in 2003.

The project took on new power with the events of September 11. National Public Radio in Kansas was broadcasting Life in a Jar that morning, and many people called to say they would not have made it through the day without this wonderful story.

Irena Sendler stood up to the terrible forces of evil in 1941. "If you see a person drowning," she told us, "you must jump into the water to save them, whether you can swim or not."

Norman Conard teaches at Uniontown High School, Uniontown, Kansas. Learn more about the Sendler project at www.mff.org or e-mail Isendler@hotmail.com.