The feat of Irena Sendler. Irena Sendler (Krzyzhanovskaya): biography. Heroes of the anti-fascist resistance in Poland Rescued children from the ghetto

The world has not become immoral just now - it has always been like this... The reward is not always given to the one who deserves it more than others.

On May 12, 2008, a woman named Irena Sendler died at the age of 98, although by birth, being Polish, she bore the name Irena Sendlerova.

Irena was born on February 15, 1910 in the city of Warsaw, in the family of a doctor, but grew up in the city of Otwock, where her father ran a clinic. From childhood, Irena absorbed his position towards people, including Jews, whose position in Poland before the war was not the best. Her father died in 1917 of typhus, contracted from Jewish patients he treated because other doctors had abandoned them. After his death, the Jewish community, whose members were often treated by Irena's father, offered financial assistance to the needy family for Irena's education. After graduating from school, Irena Sendler entered the University of Warsaw, where she openly declared her negative attitude towards the so-called “bench ghetto” (Ghetto benches) - the official method of segregation practiced in all Polish educational institutions, starting with Lviv Polytechnic in 1935. This measure consisted of a separate bench at the end of the classroom into which students of Jewish descent were seated. As a sign of protest, Jewish students and non-Jewish opponents of similar laws listened to lectures while standing. After her Jewish friend was beaten by Polish nationalists, Irena crossed out the stamp on her student card indicating her non-Jewish origin. For this she was suspended from studying at the University of Warsaw for a year. All these facts indicate that by the time the Nazi regime was established in Poland, Irena Sendler was already an accomplished young woman with her own clear political and social convictions.

Therefore, at the beginning of the occupation, she began to help Jews avoid deportation to the ghetto. Irena, with her group of like-minded people, produced more than 3,000 fake documents to help Jewish families and their children. In the process of this activity, they joined the underground resistance group Żegota, the so-called Council for Aid to Jews ( Tymczasowy Komitet Pomocy Zydom) and in 1942 this resistance group invited her to carry out an operation in the Warsaw ghetto, during which she saved more people than the legendary Oskar Schindler.

As you know, the Warsaw ghetto was one of the hallmarks of Nazi anti-Semitism: in 1940, in one of the central blocks of Warsaw, on an area of ​​4 kilometers, about 400,000 Jews were gathered (about 30% of the city’s population were housed in an area of ​​2.4% of its area, At the same time, the living density was, on average, 9 people per room). All these people remained there until the deportation in 1942, which began during the Grossaktion Warschau operation, which lasted from July 23 to September 21, 1942. From the ghetto, people were deported to the Treblinka extermination camp, where about 300,000 people were killed. The operation was carried out under the direct leadership of the head of the Warsaw district, SS Oberführer Ferdinand von Sammern-Frankenegg. But even while awaiting deportation, there was an extremely high mortality rate in the ghetto, since in addition to the atrocities committed by the SS, the inhabitants of the ghetto were given an insignificant ration, consisting of only 253 calories of nutritional value (2 kilograms of bread for a month), against 669 for the Poles and 2612 for the Germans . In addition, typhus was raging in the ghetto, whose epidemic at some point began to threaten the Germans, and for this reason they allowed social workers into the ghetto to distribute medicines and vaccinate residents. One of these workers was Irena Sendler. During her visits to the ghetto, she began to remove children from there using all possible means. She worked in a children's hotel of the Municipal Social Service and the only legal way was to take out sick and weak children in a medical van; she and the members of her group took out the rest under the threat of their own exposure and death. Children were secretly taken out in the beds of a social service medical van, taken out through underground communications, taken out on carts, covered with bales and clothes. Young children were given sedatives to make them sleepy and transported away in crates and boxes, passed off as cargo. The truck driver specially got and trained the dog so that it would bark, drowning out the rustling sounds and cries of the babies that they could make if they accidentally woke up. She also used the abandoned courthouse, located on the border of the ghetto, as one of her escape routes. At the same time, before Irena began to lead children out of the ghetto, she arranged an escape for several children. IN THE GHETTO: the Germans began arresting orphans on the streets of Warsaw and for several children, who turned out to be Jewish boys, since they did not pass the “removal of pants” test, she organized an escape from the Germans and led them into the ghetto, through a hole in the wall.

Irena Sendler herself later recalled what a terrible choice she had to face with the children’s parents - to separate, most likely forever, without the slightest guarantee of salvation, because any help to the inhabitants of the ghetto would result in inevitable execution. Irena organized a chain of assistants, consisting of 24 women and one man, who helped her in rescuing the children and furthering the cover operation. Children were placed in Polish families, orphanages and Catholic monasteries. Documents and baptismal certificates were forged, priests taught children to be baptized so as not to betray their origin. In addition, Irena Sendler compiled a card index of rescued children, with the intention of uniting them with their parents after the war. Main part rescue operation occurred in the 3 summer months of 1942, at the time of the punitive deportation of Jews from the ghetto to the Treblinka death camp. During the entire operation, 2,500 children were saved, but this includes not only those taken from the ghetto, but also children whose children Irena and her group hid even before the operation began in the ghetto, transporting them from place to place.

Irena Sendler was arrested on October 20, 1943 and placed in Pawiak prison. During the arrest, by a lucky coincidence, Irena was able to give the lists of rescued children that she kept at home to her friend, who escaped arrest and hid them under her clothes. In the dungeons, Irena was subjected to a series of brutal interrogations, during which the Gestapo tried to enter the Zhegot underground, but despite the fact that her legs and arms were broken under torture, Irena did not betray anyone from the underground, and when it became clear that interrogation and It was useless to torture her; she was sentenced to death. But the underground did not abandon Irena, and by bribing the guards, they arranged for her to escape while being transported to the place of execution, so that according to the lists she was listed as executed and for the remaining time until the end of the war, she lived under forged documents and under a false name. But she was already careful not to keep the lists of rescued children at home, and kept them in a bottle buried in the yard. She dug up this bottle in January 1945, when Poland was liberated, and gave it to the Zigot council so that they could try to reunite Jewish families. But as it turned out, most of the parents of the rescued children died in the death camps of Treblinka and Auschwitz.

After the war, Irena Sendler got married, gave birth to two children and continued her work as a social worker, despite the fact that after suffering torture at the Gestapo, movement was difficult for her. Due to the fact that during the war Irena collaborated with the Home Army and the Polish government in exile “Delegature”, which financed the Žegota council, she was prohibited from leaving the country until 1983, when she was allowed to visit Jerusalem, where the National Memorial Disaster and Heroism "Yad Vashem" a tree was planted in her honor as Righteous among the Nations. This status was assigned to her in absentia back in 1965.

The story of Irena Sendler became known throughout the world thanks to the efforts of four Kansas schoolgirls: 9th graders Megan Stewart, Elizabeth Cambers, Jessica Shelton and 11th grader Sabrina Coons, who in 1999 took on school work, which the teacher suggested to them - to dig up a little more information from a short article from 1994 in News and World Report, which read, “Irena Sendler saved 2,500 children from the Warsaw Ghetto in 1942-43.” The teacher believed that the reporter was mistaken because he had never heard of such a person as Irena Sendler, and suggested that the students conduct more detailed research. After this, the girls, believing that Irena had died long ago, began research, but could only find one note about this person on the Internet (now there are more than 300,000). But nevertheless, they did not abandon their work, but continued their search and unexpectedly learned that a man named Irena Sendler lived in a small apartment in the center of Warsaw. According to the collected material, the girls wrote the play “Life in a Jar,” which was performed more than 250 times in the USA, Canada and Poland. The girls visited Irena Sendler in Warsaw several times, and the last time was on May 3, 2008, 9 days before her death.

As Megan Stewart described her first meeting with this woman: “We ran into the room and rushed to hug this woman. She just took us by the hands and said that she would like to hear about our lives. Cambers admiringly told Sandler, “We adore you! Your heroic deed is an example for us! You are our hero! and this tiny old woman in a wheelchair, less than one and a half meters tall, answered: “A hero is someone who performs outstanding deeds. And there is nothing outstanding in what I did. This ordinary thing which had to be done"

In 2003, Pope John Paul II sent Irena Sendler a letter of gratitude for her contribution to saving human lives during the Second World War, and on October 10, 2003, she was awarded the highest Polish award - Order White Eagle.

In 2007, Irina Sendler was nominated by Poland and Israel for Nobel Prize Mira. But she was not chosen because members of the Nobel Committee decided to award the prize to US Vice President Al Gore for his film on global warming, with the interpretation: “for his efforts to collect and widely disseminate as much knowledge as possible about climate change caused by human activities.” , and laying the groundwork for countermeasures against such changes.”

Used materials:

“Every child saved with my help is not a basis for glory, but a justification for my existence on earth.”

Irena Sendler

“... the fifth - to those who will make a significant contribution to the unity of peoples, the abolition of slavery, the reduction in the size of existing armies and the promotion of a peace agreement.

...My special wish is that the awarding of prizes should not be influenced by the nationality of the candidate, so that the most deserving ones will receive the prize, regardless of whether they are Scandinavian or not.
Paris, November 27, 1895."

Look at this woman - and remember her forever! The world has not become immoral just now - it has always been like this... The reward is not always given to the one who deserves it more than others.
3 years ago, at the age of 98, a woman named Irena Sandler died. During World War II, Irina received permission to work in the Warsaw Ghetto as a plumber/welder. She had "ulterior motives" for this.
Being German, she knew about the Nazi plans for the Jews. She began carrying small children out of the ghetto in the bottom of her tool bag, and in the back of her truck she had a bag for older children. There she also drove a dog, which she trained to bark when the German guards let the car in and out through the ghetto gates. The soldiers, naturally, did not want to mess with the dog, and its barking covered up the sounds that the children could make. During this activity, Irina managed to take 2,500 children out of the ghetto and thereby save. She recalled: “I witnessed terrible scenes when, for example, the father agreed to part with the child, but the mother did not. The next day it often turned out that this family had already been sent to a concentration camp.”
She was caught; the Nazis broke her legs and arms and beat her severely. Irena kept a record of the names of all the children she carried out, and she kept the lists in a glass jar buried under a tree in her backyard. After the war, she tried to find all possible surviving parents and reunite families. But most of them ended their lives in gas chambers. The children she helped were placed in orphanages or adopted.

The world generally knew little about Irena Sendler (Krzyzanowska) until 1999, when several teenage girls from Kansas in the USA, Liz Cumbers, Megan Stewart, Sabrina Coons and Janice Underwood discovered her story.

These schoolgirls are from the countryside high school Uniontown were looking for a theme for National project"History Day". Their teacher, Norman Conrad, gave them a piece to read called "The Other Schindler" about Irena Sendler from the 1994 US news and world report. And the girls decided to research her life. An Internet search turned up only one website that mentioned Irina Sendler (there are now over 300,000). With the help of their teacher, they began to reconstruct the history of this forgotten hero Holocaust. The girls thought that Irena Sendler had died and were looking for where she was buried. To their surprise and delight, they discovered that she was alive and living with relatives in a small apartment in Warsaw. They wrote a play about her called Life in a Jar, which has since been performed more than 200 times in the US, Canada and Poland. In May 2001 they visited Irina for the first time in Warsaw and through the international press they made Irina's story known to the world. Since then they have visited Irina in Warsaw four more times. The last time was May 3, 2008, 9 days before her death.

The life of Irina Sendler was also the subject of the biography “Mother of the Children of the Holocaust: The Story of Irina Sendler” by Anna Miskovskaya. In April 2009, the television film “Irena Sendler’s Braveheart,” filmed in the fall of 2008 in Latvia, was released on American television screens.

The story of the Mother of the Children of the Holocaust is described in more detail in the articles by Yarover El P and Alexey Polikovsky .

..In the ghetto, Irena Sendler wore an icon that said “I believe in God.” With this icon she ended up in the Gestapo. Irene Sendler's arms and legs were broken by the Gestapo. The Germans wanted to know how Žegota worked and who was behind it. This, by the way, is what any government officials who are obsessed with their power want to know. They cannot understand that no one is behind people, that people act of their own free will, at their own free discretion. I do not compare anyone with anyone, I do not, in any way, compare the Nazi power in Poland with anyone. I am only talking about some mental traits that are characteristic of some people in similar social positions. When I wrote about the shareholders who went on hunger strike in Domodedovo, one government representative convinced me with heat and ardor that there was someone behind the hunger strikers. The fact that people could fight for their rights themselves seemed impossible to him.

..In 2006, when Irena Sendler was 96 years old, the Polish government and the Israeli government nominated her for the Nobel Peace Prize. In connection with her nomination for the prize, newspapers wrote about her for the first time that year. It was then that Irena Sendler and her story became known to many people. I read several newspaper publications in which she was written about as a laureate even before the award was awarded. But the prize was awarded to US Vice President Al Gore for his lecture on energy conservation.

Of course, it is surprising that when choosing between Irena Sendler and Al Gore, the Nobel Committee chose Gore. It seems to me that after this the Nobel Peace Prize can no longer be awarded. This is a dummy that has no meaning, but only money. The prize has been disgraced. It is even more surprising to me that Al Gore, a respectable man, living in a big house, not needing anything, belonging, as they say, to strong of the world That said, I accepted the award. The rich became even richer, the well-fed became even more well-fed, the world nomenklatura divided another piece among themselves, and the little quiet woman, as she lived in her one-room apartment in Warsaw, remained to live there.

I knew about Irena Sendler for a long time. I read about her in different sources. And every time I read about her, I told myself that I needed to write about her, but every time I put it off. Because I felt the inconsistency of this whole story with the arsenal of words at my disposal. I'm not sure I can put it into words. About a young woman who went to the ghetto day after day, about a driver, about a dog, about a glass jar buried in the garden. Before certain topics and events, the human tongue - at least my tongue - swoons.

A. Polikovsky

A note specifically for readers who do not like Jews (no matter for what reason, it’s an everyday matter), who, reading that Irina Sendler saved Jewish children, will say, well, Jewish children need to be saved, but others don’t? (I encountered such an aberration of perception in one of the readers). So, Irina Sandler saved the children of the Warsaw ghetto without asking whether they were Jews or not. Surely she saved and placed in orphanages many other children who could have come across to her on the streets and in the bombed-out houses of Warsaw. But in order to save other children, there was no need to hide them “in boxes of carpenter’s tools,” and there was no threat of execution for their salvation. Therefore, she and her assistants are honored precisely for saving the children of the Warsaw ghetto, whom the Nazis doomed to destruction simply because they were the children of Jews.

And Al Gore, as you know, received the Nobel Prize in 2007, and for this: “for his efforts to collect and widely disseminate the maximum amount of knowledge about climate change caused by human activity, and to lay the foundation for measures to counter such changes.”

Yarover El P

P.S. 66 years have passed since the end of World War II in Europe. This publication is like a chain of memory - the memory of the six million Jews, 20 million Russians, ten million Christians and 1900 Catholic priests who were killed, shot, raped, burned, starved and humiliated.

Irena Sendler (Sendlerova, née Krzyzanowski) was an underground movement activist who rescued 2,500 Jewish children from the Warsaw Ghetto during World War II. The Israeli Holocaust Museum Yad Vashem awarded Irena the title of Righteous Among the Nations, along with Nikolai Kiselyov and Oskar Schindler. This woman, with the help of the Zegota resistance organization in German-occupied Warsaw, provided children with false documents and, with a team of like-minded people, secretly took them out of the ghetto, giving them to orphanages, private families and monasteries.

Irena Sendler was born on February 15, 1910 in Warsaw into a Polish Catholic family, but grew up in the city of Otwock. Her father, Stanislaw Krzyzanowski, was a doctor. Stanislav died of typhus in February 1917, having contracted the disease from a patient of his who his colleague refused to treat. Many of these patients were Jewish. Stanislav taught his daughter: if a person is drowning, you need to try to save him, even if you yourself don’t know how to swim.

After the death of her father, Irena and her mother move to Warsaw. Jewish community leaders suggested that Irena's mother pay for her daughter's education. The girl sympathized with Jews from childhood. At that time, in some universities in Poland there was a rule according to which Jews were supposed to sit on the benches reserved for them at the end of the lecture hall. Irena and some of her like-minded people sat at such benches together with the Jews as a sign of protest. In the end, Irena was expelled from the university for three years.

In 1931, Irena married Mieczysław Sendlerow, a member of the Department of Classical Philology at the University of Warsaw. However, she would later divorce him and marry Stefan Zgrzembski, with whom Irena would have a daughter, Janka, and a son, Adam.

During the Nazi occupation of Poland, Sendler lived in Warsaw (previously she worked in the city departments of Social Security of Otwock and Tarczyn). In early 1939, when the Nazis took over Poland, she began helping Jews. Irena and her assistants created approximately 3,000 false documents to help Jewish families before joining the underground resistance organization Zegota. Helping Jews was extremely risky; the entire household would be immediately shot if a Jew was found hiding in their home.

In December 1942, the newly created Council for Aid to Jews "Zegota" invited Irene to head their "children's unit" under the fictitious name Iolanta. As a department employee social protection, she had special permission to enter the Warsaw ghetto. According to her position, she had to check the residents of the ghetto for signs of typhus, because the Germans were very afraid that the infection could spread beyond its borders. During such visits, Irena wore a headband with the Star of David as a sign of solidarity with the Jews, and also in order not to attract unnecessary attention to herself.

She carried children out of the Jewish ghetto in boxes, suitcases, and also on carts. Under the pretext of checking sanitary conditions during outbreaks of typhus epidemics, Sendler would come into the ghetto and take small children out of it in an ambulance, sometimes disguising them as luggage or carry-on luggage. She also used the old courthouse on the outskirts of the Warsaw Ghetto (which still stands) as the main point for the transfer of children.

Children were left in Polish families, Warsaw orphanages or monasteries. Sendler worked closely with social worker and Catholic nun Matilda Getter.

Irena wrote down information about the removed children and put them in jars, which she buried under a tree in her friend’s garden. These banks contained information about the children's real and fictitious names, as well as information about where they were taken and what family they originally belonged to. This was done so that after the end of the war the children could be returned to their families.

In 1943, Sendler was arrested by the Gestapo, severely tortured and sentenced to death. She didn't give anyone away. Fortunately, "Zegota" saved her by bribing the German guards on the way to the site of her execution. Irena was abandoned in the forest, unconscious, with broken legs and arms. Sendler's name was on the list of those executed. She had to hide until the end of the war, but she continued to save Jewish children. After the war, Irena retrieved buried jars containing 2,500 records of children. Some children were returned to their families, but, unfortunately, many of the parents were exterminated in concentration camps or went missing.

After the war, Irena Sendler continued to be persecuted by the secret police, as her activities during the war were sponsored by the Polish government. Interrogations of the pregnant Irena eventually led to the miscarriage of her second child in 1948.

In 1965, Sendler was awarded the title of “Righteous Among the Nations” by the Jewish organization Yad Vashem. Only this year, the Polish government allowed her to leave the country to receive the award in Israel.

In 2003, John Paul II sent Irene a personal letter. On October 10, she received the Order of the White Eagle, Poland's highest honor; as well as the Jan Karski Award for Brave Heart, given to her by the American Center for Polish Culture in Washington.

In 2006, the Polish President and the Israeli Prime Minister nominated her for the Nobel Peace Prize, but the prize was awarded to US Vice President Al Gore.

Irena Sendler died on May 12, 2008 in her room in a private hospital in Warsaw. She was 98 years old.

In May 2009, she was posthumously awarded the Audrey Hepburn Philanthropy Award. Named after the famous actress and UNICEF Ambassador, this award recognizes people and organizations that help children.

Sendler was the last survivor of the "Children's Section" of the Zegota organization, which she headed from January 1943 until the end of the war.

American director Mary Skinner began working on a documentary film based on the memoirs of Irena Sendler in 2003. This film will include the last interview of Irena herself, made shortly before her death. Three of Irena's assistants and several Jewish children whom they rescued took part in the filming of the film.

The film, shot in Poland and America with cinematographers Andrei Wulf and Slawomir Grunberg, will recreate the places where Irena lived and worked. This is the first documentary about Sendler's feat. Mary Skinner recorded nearly 70 hours of interviews for the film and spent seven years poring over archives, speaking with experts on the story, as well as witnesses in the United States and Poland, to uncover previously unknown details about Irena's life and work. The film will premiere in the United States in May 2011.

Irena Sendler (Irena Sendlerova, Irena Sendlerowa; 1910, Otwock, Poland - May 12, 2008, Warsaw) - Polish resistance activist, Righteous Among the Nations.

early years

Irena Sendler (Krzyzanowska) was born in 1910 in Otwock, about 25 km southeast of Warsaw. She was strongly influenced by her father, a doctor who was one of the first Polish socialists. His patients were mostly poor Jews.

The feat of Irena Sendler

She recorded the coded data of all 2,500 rescued children and hid this list in a glass jar buried under an apple tree in a neighbor's yard, hoping to find the children's relatives after the war.

On October 20, 1943, she was arrested following an anonymous denunciation. She was severely beaten, both legs and both arms were broken and she was sentenced to death. She was saved - the guards who led her to the place of execution were bribed. Official papers declared her executed. She lived in hiding until the end of the war, but continued to help Jewish children.

After the war

After the war, she unearthed a cache of jars and tried to find the parents of the rescued children. However, most of the parents died in the camps.

After the establishment of the communist regime in Poland, Irena Sendler was arrested by communist authorities for her collaboration with the Polish government in exile and the Home Army. When Sendler was interrogated in 1948, she was in her last month of pregnancy. The child was born premature and died.

In 1965, she was one of the first to receive the title of Righteous Among the Nations from the Israeli Holocaust Museum Yad Vashem. The Polish government did not allow Irena Sendler to leave the country at the Israeli invitation. She was able to visit Israel only after the fall of the communist regime.

The last years of her life, Irena Sendler lived in a one-room apartment in the center of Warsaw. She passed away on May 12, 2008, at the age of 98.

International recognition

The children only knew her underground nickname, Iolanta. In 2000, a group of high school students from the Kansas town of Unitetown, under the guidance of their history teacher, conducted research on the feat of Irena Sendler and won the competition scientific projects. The material of their work received wide international fame; Irena Sendler attracted the attention of the press and the world community. She was found by those of the rescued children who remembered the face and saw it in photographs in the press.

In 2003 she was awarded the Order of the White Eagle. In 2006, the Polish President and the Israeli Prime Minister nominated her for the Nobel Peace Prize, but the prize was awarded to US Vice President Al Gore.

Her list of 2,500 people, twice as long as Oskar Schindler's famous list, earned her the Righteous Among the Nations medal in 1965. She had to wait 18 years before she could travel to Israel to plant her tree in Memory Lane.

When Hitler's Wehrmacht invaded Poland in September 1939, Sendler was not yet thirty years old. Before the war, she worked in the social welfare department of the Warsaw municipality. And when the occupiers introduced new laws against Jews and separated the Jewish population from the Poles, she could not stay away and decided to take a risk.

For the first year, Sendler literally tore herself apart to somehow help the most needy Jewish families of the 350 thousand prisoners. However, closing the entrance to the ghetto in 1940 significantly complicated the situation: there was a shortage of food, children were exhausted, and epidemics began. “It was real hell: hundreds of people died right on the streets, and the whole world watched it in silence.”

With the help of her old teacher, Sendler obtained a pass to the ghetto for herself and several of her friends. The Nazis were afraid of epidemics, so the Poles carried out sanitary checks inside the ghetto. Irena organized a whole system of assistance, using money from the city administration and Jewish charitable organizations. She carried food, basic necessities, coal, and clothes to the ghetto. In the summer of 1942, when the deportation of Jews from the ghettos to death camps began, Irena decided that there was no time to waste. Together with her friends, she looked for the addresses of families with children and suggested that parents take their children out of the ghetto in order to give them up to Polish families or orphanages under false names.

In 2006, the Polish president and the Israeli prime minister nominated Sendler for the Nobel Prize. A year ago, Irena Sendler became a Knight of the Polish Order of the Smile - the only order in the world that is awarded to adult children.

Polish President Alexander Kwasniewski awarded Irene Sandler the Order of the White Eagle in 2003.

"Novaya Gazeta" about Irena Sendler.

She saved children in the Warsaw ghetto. It was a whole system of salvation in the very center of despair, hopelessness and darkness. Information about this woman was previously posted in the community. But in this case there is more complete material.

In 1940, Irena Sendler was thirty years old. She went to Warsaw ghetto and carried food, medicine, and clothes there. Soon the Germans issued a ban on visiting the ghetto. Then Irena Sendler got a job at the municipality and continued to go there as a sanitation worker. At this time, she was already a member of the underground Polish organization “Zhegota”, created to save Jews.

In the ghetto, Irena Sendler went from house to house, basement, barracks and looked for families with children everywhere. She invited parents to give her their children in order to take them out of the ghetto. There is no guarantee. She could have been arrested when leaving the ghetto, or based on a denunciation, she could have been captured later, already outside the ghetto walls; the Germans could also find the children on the other side of the wall and send them to Treblinka. But still, parents gave their children to Irena Sendler. Different sources give different numbers of children taken by Irena Sendler from the ghetto, but no one gives a figure less than 2400. Age - from 6 months to 15 years.

Irena Sendler, this small, round-faced woman, was not only a brave person, but also a very organized, responsible worker. For each child, she kept a card where she wrote down his previous name, his new name, and the address of the adoptive family. Much has been written and much is known about Polish anti-Semitism during the war, but there were also families who took children in during this time of famine, there was the organization “Zhegota”, and there was Irena Sendler. Children from Polish families were distributed to orphanages as Polish children. Irena Sendler also wrote down the address and number of the orphanage on the card. It was a whole system of salvation that worked in the very center of despair, hopelessness, hunger, darkness and destruction.

Irena Sendler was arrested following an anonymous denunciation. The anonymous identity has not yet been revealed and will never be revealed again. This man goes into the darkness of time without a name or surname. Just a figure without a face or voice, just a dark silhouette against a light window.

Remaining anonymous, he refused the reward. This means that he was not motivated by self-interest.

He was a cautious, prudent man. He didn’t want to prance around with his denunciation in the light of everyone’s viewing. He informed where he needed to go, showed vigilance, satisfied his passion for order - and move on with your life in peace.

In the ghetto, Irena Sendler wore an icon that said “I believe in God.” With this icon she ended up in the Gestapo. Irene Sendler's arms and legs were broken by the Gestapo. The Germans wanted to know how Žegota worked and who was behind it. This, by the way, is what any government officials who are obsessed with their power want to know. They cannot understand that no one is behind people, that people act of their own free will, at their own free discretion. I do not compare anyone with anyone, I do not, in any way, compare the Nazi power in Poland with anyone. I am only talking about some mental traits that are characteristic of some people in similar social positions. When I wrote about the shareholders who went on hunger strike in Domodedovo, one government representative convinced me with heat and ardor that there was someone behind the hunger strikers. The fact that people could fight for their rights themselves seemed impossible to him.

Irena Sendler buried a glass jar with her card index in her friend’s garden. She did not tell the Germans the location of the tree under which the jar was buried, and thus prevented them from finding the children she saved and sending them to Treblinka. She also did not betray her comrades from the municipality who did the documents for the children. She also did not betray those who helped her take the children out through the courthouse adjacent to the ghetto. Not only did she not betray anyone, she also never forgot how to smile. Everyone who met her writes that she always smiled. In all the photographs I saw, there was a smile on her round face.

Irena Sendler did not act alone. For example, in all the stories about her activities in the ghetto, the driver of the truck in the back of which she took out the children is mentioned. In some sources we are talking not about a truck, but about a cart, and not about a driver, but about a driver. Maybe it's a mix-up, or maybe there was a truck, a cart, a driver, and a driver.

The driver had a dog and he took it into the cab with him. As soon as he saw the Germans, he mercilessly pressed the dog’s paw, and the poor thing began to bark pitifully. The barking should have drowned out the crying if it had come from the back at that moment. The dog did not understand what he had done wrong and why the owner kicked her on the paw with his heavy boot. But dogs learn quickly, and soon she was already barking at the first movement of her owner’s leg. This dog also took part in rescuing children.

There were not only the truck driver, and not only the cart driver, and not only the dog, which I imagine was a mongrel big dog grey-red color, with a wet nose and sparkling hungry eyes. There were also people who ransomed Irena Sendler from the Gestapo. The vaunted German bureaucracy turned out to be corrupt. It is fortunate that bureaucrats can be corrupt; corruption in some conditions is the only path leading to saving lives or to justice.

The amount for which the unknown Gestapo agreed to release Irena Sendler from prison is not indicated anywhere. I think all the paperwork was completed correctly. That is, the execution protocol was written flawlessly and went through the authorities. The accounting department put it in the correct folder and wrote out the appropriate amounts. Perhaps someone even received a bonus for shooting outside working hours. A number of Reichsmarks were also issued for the cremation of the body, which, presumably, were a Polish gravedigger or German soldier With a calm soul, he put it in his pocket and drank it in a pub.

Only the execution itself did not take place .

The Germans threw the ransomed Irena Sendler out of her car in the forest with her arms and legs broken and her face swollen from beatings.

The people from Žegota picked her up. The icon was with her. The underground provided her with documents under a different name. She did not appear in the ghetto until the end of the war. And there was nowhere to appear: in the spring of 1943, the Germans decided to finally liquidate the ghetto. SS detachments, entering the ghetto, ran into fire that came from roofs, windows and even from underground sewers. It was the first uprising in a European occupied city, and the Germans failed to suppress it for two months. They dealt with France faster.

After the war, Irena Sendler opened her glass jar. She was a very stubborn woman. She took out her cards and tried to find the rescued children and their parents. She was the only one who knew what Polish names the Jewish children removed from the ghetto had and what orphanages they lived in. Nothing worked out, she was unable to reunite the families. The children no longer had parents.

Irena Sendler lived quietly in her one-room apartment in Warsaw. I was in Warsaw in 1983. Martial law has just been introduced in Poland. I remember wandering the dark, snowy streets and entering Catholic churches. I remember a tray in a grocery store on which a lone bone with a growth of meat lay in a pool of blood. I remember the gloomy faces of the Poles. Now I think that during those wanderings around an unfamiliar city, in those shops among gloomy people, in those cathedrals, where I stood as a quiet stranger behind the backs of those praying, I could have met her. What a pity that I didn’t meet you.

On a dark, cold morning I once stood on a long snow-covered platform - I don’t remember what city it was - and waited for a train. Trains in Poland were either gray or blue-gray, and their clanging and knocking emanated melancholy. I was wandering through the untouched snow waiting for the train and suddenly I saw a table with the train schedule, which indicated at what time and from which platform the train to Auschwitz was leaving.

In 2006, when Irena Sendler was 96 years old, the Polish government and the Israeli government nominated her for the Nobel Peace Prize. In connection with her nomination for the prize, newspapers wrote about her for the first time that year. It was then that Irena Sendler and her story became known to many people. I read several newspaper publications in which she was written about as a laureate even before the award was awarded. But the prize was awarded to US Vice President Al Gore for his lecture on energy conservation.

Of course, it is surprising that when choosing between Irena Sendler and Al Gore, the Nobel Committee chose Gore. It seems to me that after this the Nobel Peace Prize can no longer be awarded. This is a dummy that has no meaning, but only money. The prize has been disgraced. It is even more surprising to me that Al Gore, a respectable man living in a big house, not needing anything, belonging, as they say, to the powers that be, accepted the prize. The rich became even richer, the well-fed became even more well-fed, the world nomenklatura divided another piece among themselves, and the little quiet woman, as she lived in her one-room apartment in Warsaw, remained to live there.

I knew about Irena Sendler for a long time. I read about her in various sources. And every time I read about her, I told myself that I needed to write about her, but every time I put it off. Because I felt the inconsistency of this whole story with the arsenal of words at my disposal. I'm not sure I can put it into words. About a young woman who went to the ghetto day after day, about a driver, about a dog, about a glass jar buried in the garden. Before certain topics and events, the human tongue—at least my tongue—swoons.

The other day I received a letter from an addressee unknown to me. It was a distant echo of the mailing, which was started by no one knows who and no one knows when. More and more people were involved in the mailing list, and my address accidentally ended up in it. The entire letter consisted of a brief history of Irena Sendler. The letter ended like this: “I am making my small contribution by forwarding this letter to you. I hope you will do the same. More than sixty years have passed since the end of World War II in Europe. This email is being sent out as a chain of remembrance of the millions of people who were killed, shot, raped, burned, starved and humiliated!

Become a link in the chain of memory and help us spread the letter around the world. Send it to your friends and ask them not to break this chain.

Please don't just delete this email. After all, it will take no more than a minute to redirect it.”

So I sent you this letter.

Alexey Polikovsky