Irena Sendler memorial site

When Germany invaded Poland in 1939 Irena Sendler had no doubt how to respond. “I saw the Polish nation drowning. And those in most difficult position were the Jews. And among them those most vulnerable were the children. So I had to help.”

Sendler, a social care nurse for the Warsaw city council, spent the next four years risking her life in the Warsaw ghetto, delivering essential supplies and, when the true purposes of Nazi policy became apparent, smuggling out as many children as she could.

She saved many hundreds of lives — perhaps as many as 2,500. Even under torture and sentence of death, she refused to reveal the whereabouts of the rescued children to the Nazi occupiers, and after escaping captivity went back to the underground, making sure that those she had hidden survived the war.

She was born in Warsaw in 1910, the only child of Dr Stanislaw Krzyzanowski. The family moved to the nearby town of Otwock, where her father had a reputation as the only doctor who would treat Jewish patients during typhoid epidemics; he himself died of the disease in 1917. Irena, unusually for a Catholic child, was allowed to play with Jewish children and said that her father taught her “that if you see a person drowning, you must jump into the water to save them, whether you can swim or not”.

She married Mieczyslaw Sendler and became a social worker, caring for poor Jewish families in Warsaw. Under German occupation, conditions for the city’s 400,000 Jews deteriorated rapidly, and Sendler, defying Nazi orders, began bringing them supplies. After the Warsaw ghetto was sealed off in 1940, Sendler and some of her colleagues obtained passes from a sympathiser in the city authorities, letting them into the ghetto as sanitation workers.

They carried in food, clothes and medicine — including typhoid vaccinations — sometimes returning several times a day despite the risk to their own health and the horrors they witnessed. Starving children, abandoned corpses and SS officers using skulls for target practice — “I saw all this and a million other things that a human eye should never have to see,” she later said, “and it has stayed with me for every second of every day that God has granted me to live.”

In the summer of 1942 deportations from the ghetto to Treblinka death camp began. Sendler joined Zegota, the Polish organisation set up to help Jews, and began getting children out. “We would go to the ghetto every day and try to get as many children as possible because the situation would worsen every day.”

Smuggling them out was risky, because any Pole caught helping Jews was sentenced to death. Sendler used false documents, hid small children, sedated, in sacks and boxes — even coffins — and sent older ones out through the sewers or basement passageways. One mechanic took a baby out in his toolbox. Others went through a courthouse which had one entrance in the ghetto and another on the “Aryan side”.

But for Sendler, the hardest part was persuading parents to part with their children. Though the parents knew the children would die if they stayed, Sendler could offer no guarantee that they would be any safer if they left. She later described “infernal scenes. Father agreed but mother didn’t. Grandmother cuddled the child most tenderly and, weeping bitterly, said ‘I won’t give away my grandchild at any price’. We sometimes had to leave such unfortunate families without taking their children from them. I went there the next day and often found that everyone had been taken to the Umschlagsplatz railway siding for transport to death camps.”

Once the children were out, Sendler used her network to find them homes in Polish families, orphanages and convents. To help them blend in, the children were taught Christian prayers and given new identities. Sendler kept a careful list of their real identities in the hope that they could at some point be reunited with their families. But in October 1943, alerted by an informer, 11 German officers arrived to arrest Sendler. She had no time to dispose of the list and gave it to a colleague, who hid it in her underwear while the soldiers ripped Sendler’s house apart. Sendler was taken to the notorious Pawiak prison, where she was methodically tortured and beaten, leaving her permanently scarred. She never revealed the names of the children or of her underground colleagues.

Officially, she was executed in early 1944. But in fact, Zegota had bribed a German guard to let her escape from death row.