Irena Sendler was born in 1910 in Otwock, a town some 15 miles southeast of
Warsaw. She was greatly influenced by her father who was one of the first
Polish Socialists. As a doctor his patients were mostly poor Jews. In 1939,
Germany invaded Poland, and the brutality of the Nazis accelerated with
murder, violence and terror. At the time, Irena was a Senior Administrator
in the Warsaw Social Welfare Department, which operated the canteens in
every district of the city. Previously, the canteens provided meals,
financial aid, and other services for orphans, the elderly, the poor and the
destitute. Now, through Irena, the canteens also provided clothing, medicine
and money for the Jews. They were registered under fictitious Christian
names, and to prevent inspections, the Jewish families were reported as
being afflicted with such highly infectious diseases as typhus and
tuberculosis.
But in 1942, the Nazis herded hundreds of thousands of Jews into a 16-block
area that came to be known as the Warsaw Ghetto. The Ghetto was sealed and
the Jewish families ended up behind its walls, only to await certain death.
Irena Sendler was so appalled by the conditions that she joined Zegota, the
Council for Aid to Jews, organized by the Polish underground resistance
movement, as one of its first recruits and directed the efforts to rescue
Jewish children.
