Sendler's Children
The Polish Voice,

25 September 2003

By Marcin Mierzejewski

The Talmud says that, "He who saves a single life, saves the world entire." The Polish Underground unit headed by Irena Sendler saved 2,500 children from the Warsaw ghetto. Today, they call themselves "Sendler's children," and want the 93-year-old Pole to be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.

It is a true story, although it seems unbelievable. Sixty years ago, in the fourth year of the Germani occupation, a group of Polish underground activists, mainly women, risked their lives and smuggled 2,500 Jewish children out of the ghetto.

Sendler is the last survivor from the Children's Section of the Żegota Council for Assistance to the Jews. From January 1943, she was the head of the section. She has received awards and distinctions from several countries, but she became the focus of wider interest only three years ago, after four students from Uniontown, Kansas, wrote and staged a play about this heroic woman. The play has been performed many times, not only in Kansas, and audiences have always been fascinated; last year, March 10 was celebrated as Irena Sendler Day in Kansas.

This year, at the initiative of the Children of the Holocaust association, which operates in Poland and includes people saved by Żegota and others, Sendler was granted the Jan Karski Award "For Courage and Heart," which is given by the American Center of Polish Culture in Washington. In a letter to the association, thanking them for the award, "Pani Irena," as those she saved call her, wrote that "I keep asking myself whether I deserve such an award," stressing that it should be given to the whole network of Żegota collaborators, without whose sacrifice it would have been impossible to save so many children. She lists the names of her underground liaison officers from the Children's Section: Irena Schultz, Jadwiga Piotrowska, Janina Grabowska, Jadwiga Bilwin, Iza Kuczkowska, Wanda Drozdowska, Lucyna Franciszkiewicz, Stanisław Papuziński, Róża Zawadzka, and Jadwiga Deneka. "And a group of noble-minded people," she adds.

Many members and collaborators of Żegota, including several liaison officers of Sendler, did not live to see the end of the German occupation, paying the highest price for saving others' lives.

Fearing an epidemic

This was a time when the Nazis started to liquidate the Jewish Ghetto-life inside the Ghetto was recently recreated in painstaking detail by Roman Polanski in his film The Pianist. The Jews from the Warsaw ghetto, herded with rifle butts into cattle train cars at the Umschlagplatz square in Warsaw, were to be sent east-"to work," the Germans claimed. The Polish underground knew where these transports were going and what happened to the people they carried. They were sent to Treblinka, a small village in Mazovia, where the Nazis organized a death camp as part of the Reinhard Aktion-the code-name for the extermination of Jews in Poland.

When the war broke out, Sendler was working as a social worker for the Social Care Department of the Warsaw City Board. From the beginning of the German occupation, the department was not allowed to grant any assistance to Jews. In spite of that, until the ghetto was closed in November 1940, the Polish social workers, who mostly originated from the Polish Socialist Party (PPS), broke these regulations. Assistance was usually provided on the basis of false documents. Remembering those times, Sendler wrote: "At the beginning I was driven by emotions: realizing the horror of life behind the walls, I tried to help my old friends."

After the ghetto was closed, the German authorities decided that the people inside would not need any form of care. Social workers were refused the right to enter the ghetto. Fearing an epidemic, the Germans allowed only sanitation services to enter.

Getting a Polish sanitary worker ID wasn't a big problem for the Polish conspirators. Until January 1943, Sendler and her close collaborator Irena Schultz were able to enter the ghetto legally. Wearing nurses' uniforms, they carried food, clothes, money and medicine, including a vaccine against typhoid fever. Sometimes they would go the ghetto two to three times a day.

A good deal

When at the turn of 1942/43 it became clear that staying in the ghetto was a death sentence, Poles started a campaign to save the children. Sendler's unit in the City Board joined forces with Żegota. In December, a first meeting was held with the Żegota chairman. Sendler recalls: "We would go the ghetto and try to get as many children as possible because the situation would worsen every day. While working in this unit with, among others, my colleague Stefania Wichlińska, the liaison officer of Zofia Kossak-Szczucka [co-founder of Żegota-ed.], I learned that Żegota had funds from the Polish Government Delegation in the Homeland. After becoming familiar with our three-year fight to save the Jews, Julian Grobelny, who always had a great sense of humor, said: 'Well, Jolanta (my pseudonym in the PPS unit in the City Board), we're striking a good deal together: you have a team of trusted people, and we will have the necessary funds to help a larger number of people.'" Grobelny, aka Trojan, a prewar community activist from Łódź, was Sendler's party colleague from the PPS. Their "joint venture" developed at great speed. After a month, Sendler was appointed head of the Children's Section.

Parents would give their children to Sendler's "smugglers," who were dressed as nurses, realizing that for the children, this was perhaps their last chance of survival-and that they were seeing them perhaps for the last time. The smugglers promised to hide the children in a safe place on the "Aryan" side, but they knew they could not guarantee the children's safety because they were risking their lives themselves. They could be discovered at any moment.

Żegota prepared false documents for the children. The best were Catholic baptismal certificates provided by trusted priests. The smuggled children were first placed in apartments called "emergency rooms," where the older children had to learn their new names. They were then sent to Polish families, orphanages and convents; later they would receive care packages with material support.

Marked for execution

Sendler herself also faced death; caught by the Gestapo in October 1943, she was held at Pawiak Prison-the place of martyrdom of hundreds of Poles from the resistance movement, as well as those caught in street roundups. The Nazis knew she was a conspirator and tortured her to get her to speak. She resisted. "I have the 'calling cards' of those Übermensch on my body till this day," wrote Sendler. However, no one knows the details of her three-month stay at Pawiak. She does not talk about it, even to family and friends.

Sendler was to be executed at the Gestapo headquarters on Szucha Avenue-the building which since the end of war has housed the Ministry of Education, where Sendler worked for some time. The execution did take place-but only in the German records. Her name was even printed on the posters listing the names of those executed. But Sendler knew that her colleagues were looking for a way to free her. In the prison, she received several notes from Trojan. The Żegota chairman wrote, "We're doing everything to get you out of that hell." When it turned out that a Gestapo officer could be bribed, the Żegota board provided the money without hesitation. The officer called her out of the group of prisoners to be executed, led her out of the building, and shouted, "Run!" After that, Sendler continued her work in Żegota, under a new name.

Sendler's children

This is not a single story, but 2,500 separate stories. Yet, these are the lucky few: there were half a million people in the Warsaw Ghetto. A quarter of a million more were murdered in Treblinka.

The children of the Holocaust can be divided into those who remember the occupation and those who were too small to remember-they know their story from the reports of others. Many of the latter were brought up in Polish families after the war, and often learned about their real family only after they had grown up.

Michał Głowiński, one of "Sendler's children," today a professor of literature at the Polish Academy of Sciences and an esteemed writer, remembers those times well. In Czarne sezony (Black Seasons), of which the English translation is due to be released in the United States next year, he says: "In fact, I don't understand what happened, I can't understand why fate turned on us. I am bewildered...bewildered by everything. I am bewildered that I'm alive."

Głowiński's parents, who got out of the ghetto thanks to a bribe in early 1943, knew Sendler before the war. Sendler knew the addresses of the safe apartments, so it was easier for them to hide on the "Aryan" side of the wall. For the Jews in hiding, not just the Germans were a threat. They had also to beware of szmalcownicy-Poles who collaborated with the Germans and blackmailed the Jews and the Poles who were hiding them. Żegota fought such people. Others would give away the Jews in their own house, fearing for their safety. In the General Province, which included part of the German-occupied Poland not incorporated into the Third Reich, assisting Jews was punishable by death. In no other country occupied by the Germans was the punishment so harsh.

The difficulty with little Michał was that he had very "unfavorable" looks: his red hair and "non-Aryan" face could bring death to the whole family at any moment. Sendler, whom Głowiński calls in his book "a good spirit of those in hiding," helped again, using her contacts. Głowiński, like many other children smuggled from the Warsaw Ghetto by Żegota, was sent to a convent. Many convents running orphanages cooperated with the Polish underground that helped save Jews. Głowiński was first sent for a short stay to the St. Felice Order in Otwock, and then to a care center run by the Sisters of Service in Turkowice near Hrubieszów (in today's Lublin province), where he stayed until the end of the war. That particular convent became famous due to its activities during the German occupation. The nuns from Turkowice hid around 30 Jewish children in their orphanage. Four of the nuns were honored after the war with the "Righteous Among the Nations" title, awarded by the Yad Vashem Institute in Israel.

Katarzyna Meloch, a journalist who has focused on social issues for years, was also hidden in Turkowice. Her parents did not survive the war, but shortly after the end of the occupation she was found by her aunt. "I was lucky, because the woman who led me out of the ghetto-Sendler's liaison officer-was caught by the Gestapo and killed," she says. "If the aunt had not seen the address on a package sent to me to the care center, she would not have found me so easily." In conspiracy, the rule was: "The less you know, the less you can betray," so even close loved ones did not know the address of the children.

The liaison officer was Jadwiga Deneka, aka Kasia, a member of the Polish Socialists, who in 1943 became the Workers' Polish Socialist Party. The critical attitude of the RPPS to the government-in-exile in London did not discourage it from cooperating with Żegota.

The address of the Warsamw apartment of Deneka, which was "an emergency room" for the runaways, was known to many people in the ghetto. Seventy-Six Obozowa Street, in the Koło district, was the address were little Katarzyna was driven. She describes her memories of that time: "I walked out of the ghetto in a very hot summer (1942). From the apartment in Koło district I can remember huge tomatoes in the window, ripening in the sun. They caught my eye when I walked out of a district where you didn't think about whether it was summer or winter."

In November 1943 the Germans discovered a press distribution point headed by Deneka which was also a hiding place for Jews. Tortured by the Gestapo, Deneka didn't give any names, and sent warnings from Pawiak. She was shot, together with 11 Jewish women, in the ruins of the ghetto.

For Meloch, her stay with the sisters in Turkowice is a beautiful childhood memory. After leaving the ghetto, the convent, located in the Lublin countryside, among forests and meadows, seemed a fairy-tale place to her. She remembers with love and respect the women who took care of her, though now, when she thinks of how to describe them, she says they were "cold... Maybe only such women could handle such an enormous-also in emotional terms-challenge?"

But there are also unpleasant memories, for example the joint singing of Old Polish Eastern songs; the lyrics "the Jews who killed Jesus Christ" was a recurring motif. After 60 years, Meloch can still sing a few verses of the song so painfully ingrained in the memory of the 10-year-old Kasia. The pain did not disappear with the war; Meloch kept the name Irena Dąbrowska that she had in Turkowice, hiding the fact that she was Jewish. Only over 20 years after the war, as a mature woman, did she decide to go back to her real name.
At the end of occupation, for children in Turkowice, Ukrainians unexpectedly became an even bigger danger than the Germans. One of the nuns, Sister Longina, became the victim of anti-Polish actions carried out by the Ukrainian Insurgent Army; she was murdered together within a group of children, one of them a Jewish boy.

A race against time

When the students from Uniontown first staged their play, Life in a Jar (Sendler kept coded data on the saved children, with their true names, in soda water bottles buried in the garden; in the play, these are jars), they were convinced they were presenting the story of a great hero. Only after their work gained publicity, did they find out that Sendler was alive. In 2001, Elizabeth, Megan, Sabrina and Janice came to Poland with their teacher Norm Conard. They met with Sendler in her Warsaw apartment. "Your performance and work is continuing the effort I started over 50 years ago. You are my dearly beloved girls," wrote Sendler in one of her letters. The photographs of the four girls stands by her bed.

Elżbieta Ficowska, the chair of the Holocaust Children Association, represented Sendler last year at a ceremony in her honor, organized by the mayor of Kansas City. Art Garfunkel performed and invitations to the dinner cost thousands of dollars. The Karski Award, granted in recent weeks, is only the beginning of the association's plans. "We would like to establish an international Irena Sendler Award, granted to people who in a sense continue her work, such as the teacher from Uniontown, who promoted the spirit of tolerance among his students," says Ficowska. For the time being, there is a lack of money. But Ficowska hopes that finding a sponsor may be facilitated by her October visit to Washington, D.C., where she will accept the Karski Award on behalf of Sendler.

"Irena Sendler and her life are a great symbol of humanism," she says. "Today's world, which is turning wild, needs such a symbol." She adds that the association's next goal will be to nominate Sendler for the Nobel Peace Prize.

The Association of the Children of the Holocaust in Poland was founded in Warsaw in 1991. At first it had 45 members; currently about 800 people, who as children in occupied Poland were lucky enough to survive the Holocaust, belong to the Association.

The Association's mission is "to build a community of people saved from the Holocaust," providing mutual support, and preserving the memory of the Holocaust and the life of the Jewish community in prewar Poland. The Association also aims to improve the material situation of its members, most of whom have obtained veteran's rights, and to organize meetings among them, as well as publish the Children of the Holocaust series of memoirs; two volumes have already appeared, the third is being prepared. Members can also attend counseling sessions.

Żegota

"Żegota" is the underground code name of the Council for Assistance to the Jews which operated from 1942 to 1945, one of the institutions of the Polish Underground State. The Council was subordinated directly to the Polish Government Delegation in the Homeland-the central Polish executive branch in occupied Poland. The Council's Board included representatives of the most important political forces constituting the Underground State (including the Peasant Party, Democratic Party, Polish Socialist Party and Workers' Polish Socialist Party). It also associated representatives of the Jewish Workers' Party (Bund) and the Jewish National Committee.

Through the Government Delegation, Żegota obtained money for its activity from the Polish government in exile in London. About 10 percent of its budget came from organizations representing Polish Jews.

The Council organized food, financial and legalization help for Jews both those trapped by Germans in ghettos and hiding in cities and villages. It provided Jews with false documents (about 50,000), found them apartments and hiding places, organized care for children (over 2,500 in Warsaw) and provided financial support (about 4,000 people). Local councils of Żegota operated also in Cracow and Lviv. It is estimated that the organization provided help for several hundred thousand Jews.

The Council was a continuation of the Council for Aid to Polish Jews in Occupied Poland founded in 1942 in Warsaw, known in the underground circles as Konrad Żegota Committee. It was founded by Wanda Krahelska-Filipowiczowa, an activist in the socialist movement, and Zofia Kossak who was active in the Catholic Front for the Rebirth of Poland (later a novelist, author of the novel Crusaders).

One of the surviving members of Żegota is Prof. Władysław Bartoszewski, Polish minister of foreign affairs in 1995 and from 2000 to 2001.

Żegota's activity has been described, among other works, in Teresa Prekerowa's book entitled Underground Council for Assistance to the Jews 1942-1945 (also published in French).