[dfwgator]

It certainly wasn’t a picnic for Gentile Poles, either.

[DuncanWaring]

[DuncanWaring]

Ping.

[wiggen]

Tough,chilling read.

[call meVeronica]

bump 4 l8r

[dfwgator]

Just another point, there were Jews from all over Europe that were shipped into Warsaw Ghetto, it wasn’t just Polish Jews.

[afraidfortherepublic]

Irena Sendler (15 February 1910 – 12 May 2008) was a Polish Catholic social worker who served in the Polish Underground and the Zegota resistance organization in German-occupied Warsaw during World War II.

Assisted by some two dozen other Zegota members, Sendler saved 2,500 Jewish children by smuggling them out of the Warsaw Ghetto, providing them with false documents, and sheltering them in individual and group children's homes outside the Ghetto.

On 14 March 2007 Sendler was honored by Poland's Senate. At age 97, she was unable to leave her nursing home to receive the honor, but she sent a statement through Elbieta Ficowska, whom Sendler had saved as an infant. Polish President Lech Kaczyski stated she "can justly be nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize" (though nominations are supposed to be kept secret). On 11 April 2007, she received the Order of the Smile as the oldest recipient of the award.

In May 2009, Irena Sendler was posthumously granted the Audrey Hepburn Humanitarian Award. The award, named in honor of the late actress and UNICEF ambassador, is presented to persons and organizations recognised for helping children. In its citation, the Audrey Hepburn Foundation recalled Irena Sendler’s heroic efforts that saved two thousand five hundred Jewish children during the German occupation of Poland in World War Two.

Sendler was the last survivor of the Children's Section of the Zegota Council to Assist Jews, which she had headed from January 1943 until the end of the war.

In 2007 considerable publicity accompanied Sendler's nomination for the Nobel Peace Prize. While failed nominations for the award have not been officially announced by the Nobel organization for 50 years, the International Peace Research Institute, Oslo, reported in 2007 that Irena Sendler's nominator had made the nomination public. Regardless of its legitimacy, talk of the nomination focused a spotlight on Sendler and her wartime achievements. The 2007 Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and former Vice President of the United States Al Gore.

And just this week, Sendler's grave was defaced with graffitti by someone who painted "Jews out!" over it. Things haven't changed much, unfortunately.

Irena Sendler in 2005

[GourmetDan]

My German grandmother’s brother spent time in a concentration camp for a casual comment about that “damned Nazi uniform” that was heard by a snitch.

What was the first thing he did when he got home? Hid a family of Jews in their summer cabin in the forest. Shared their ration cards to feed them. He and his whole family could have been executed for it. Neighbors knew and didn’t tell a soul.

Individual resistance is the only answer to tyranny.

[GOPJ]

Those who had remained in the ghetto were plagued by feelings of guilt. They complained "that the Jews allowed themselves to be lead like sheep to the slaughter." One man wrote: "If only we had all climbed over the ghetto wall and stormed the streets of Warsaw, armed with knives, axes or even stones -- then perhaps they would have killed 10,000 or 20,000, but never 300,000!"

There are hardly any documents left on the armed resistance that eventually did erupt, in April 1943. The Germans brutally suppressed the uprising. SS brigade leader Jürgen Stroop had the buildings burned down, one after another, and the main synagogue blown up. On May 16, 1943, he reported: "The former Jewish residential area of Warsaw no longer exists."

I'm always stunned people forgave the Germans so quickly...