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12 de Mayo, 2008
Irena Sendler Dies
Categorized under Salud | Tags: Holocaust, Irena Sendler, Nazi, Poles, Que Viva Las Mujeres, Warsaw Poles
I'VE WRITTEN a few times of why the Warsaw Poles (and all the related horror) are personally important to me. But one need not have a story of their own ancestry tied to such horrific events to admire and be in awe of the young social worker and activist in the anti-Nazi resistance named Irena Sendler who was personally responsible for fighting the tide of hate and murder that haunted and swallowed so many of our people. Irena was a spirit and a model of living and seeing things that people of all ethnicities can benefit by celebrating and emulating. Her story should be told to our children forever.
Irena Sendler — credited with saving some 2,500 Jewish children from the Nazi Holocaust by smuggling them out of the Warsaw Ghetto, some of them in baskets — died Monday, her family said. She was 98. [...]
Sendler was a 29-year-old social worker with the city's welfare department when Germany invaded Poland in September 1939, launching World War II. Warsaw's Jews were forced into a walled-off ghetto.
Seeking to save the ghetto's children, Sendler masterminded risky rescue operations. Under the pretext of inspecting sanitary conditions during a typhoid outbreak, she and her assistants ventured inside the ghetto — and smuggled out babies and small children in ambulances and in trams, sometimes wrapped up as packages.
Teenagers escaped by joining teams of workers forced to labor outside the ghetto. They were placed in families, orphanages, hospitals or convents.
Records show that Sendler's team of about 20 people saved nearly 2,500 children from the Warsaw Ghetto between October 1940 and its final liquidation in April 1943, when the Nazis burned the ghetto, shooting the residents or sending them to death camps.
"Every child saved with my help and the help of all the wonderful secret messengers, who today are no longer living, is the justification of my existence on this earth, and not a title to glory," Sendler said in 2007 in a letter to the Polish Senate after lawmakers honored her efforts in 2007.
—Irena Sendler, social worker who saved 2,500 Jewish children from Holocaust, dies at age 98
This is a hero. This is a human at her best. Gracias, Irena. Dziękuję. And Salud!
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Comentarios (4)
Joanna dijo:
Thank you for sharing this story. My daughter chose to research
to research the Warsaw resistance for her History day project, and she has just been asked to write a paper about "everything she knows about WWII" so I'll pass this on to her.
Palabras por Joanna spat forth on el 14 de Mayo, 2008 at 10:27 AM
latinitasoyme
dijo:
that is an absolutely beautiful person, thank goodness for her. only through her example and others like her do we find hope in this frightening world we live in.
Palabras por latinitasoyme
spat forth on el 17 de Mayo, 2008 at 04:48 PM
latinitasoyme
dijo:
that is an absolutely beautiful person, thank goodness for her. only through her example and others like her do we find hope in this frightening world we live in.
Palabras por latinitasoyme
spat forth on el 17 de Mayo, 2008 at 04:48 PM
nezua dijo:
agreed.
Palabras por nezua spat forth on el 17 de Mayo, 2008 at 04:55 PM