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Warsaw, Poland . . . 1942 – On October 12, 1940 – Yom Kippur – the Germans issued a decree calling for the establishment of a ghetto in Warsaw. About 400,000 Jews from the city and the surrounding region were forced to move into an area of 1.3 square miles. In mid-November, the ghetto was sealed. On account of the cramped conditions, poor sanitation, and very limited food and medicine, disease and starvation claimed thousands of lives each month. In July 1942, mass deportations of Jews from the Warsaw ghetto began. Most were sent to Treblinka. Horrified by the Germans’ persecution of the Jews, a group of Polish citizens formed an underground organization called the Council for the Aid to Jews, or Zegota, in September 1942. Irena Sendler became the head of Zegota’s Children’s Bureau. She obtained documents that allowed her to enter the ghetto, and she began to smuggle children out. Irena and the members of Zegota led some children out through the underground corridors of a courthouse and through a tram depot. They sedated some infants and carried them out in potato sacks or coffins. A church located on the edge of the ghetto also became useful. It had two entrances, one inside the ghetto and one on the Christian side of Warsaw. With Zegota’s help, some children entered the church as Jews and exited as “Christians.” In addition to smuggling children out of the ghetto, Irena Sendler found safe places for them to hide – often with non-Jewish families in the Warsaw area. Children were also sheltered in convents, hospitals, and orphanages. The Germans learned of Irena’s activities. On October 20, 1943, she was arrested by the Gestapo and taken to the Pawiak prison. Irena was tortured brutally, but she refused to give any information about Zegota or about the children she had placed in hiding. She was sentenced to death. Members of Zegota bribed one of the Gestapo agents, and on the day Irena was to be executed, she was permitted to escape. She had to go into hiding for the remainder of the war but continued to coordinate her rescue work. By January 1945, when Warsaw was liberated by Soviet troops, the Children’s Bureau of Zegota had saved more than 2,500 Jewish children. |
 Irena Sandler 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 underground bribed a guard to let her go. After the war, she dug up the jars. Irena Sendler backgrounder Link Irena Sendler, social worker, WWII hero, rescuer of Jews
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