In Warsaw, late October 1943, Irena Sendler and Janina Grabowska were enjoying a rare moment of peace in their war-torn city. But their laughter froze when they heard the Gestapo pounding on Sendler’s door. Sendler rushed to the window to dispose of incriminating evidence— only to see more police patrolling below. Knowing she was minutes from arrest, she tossed Janina her most dangerous possession: a glass jar containing the names of over 2,000 Jewish children she’d smuggled to safety.
This arrest wasn’t the first consequence Sendler had faced in her lifelong crusade against anti-Semitism. Born to Catholic parents in 1910, she grew up in a predominantly Jewish town where her father treated poor Jewish patients other doctors refused to help. Irena was furious at the constant discrimination against her Jewish friends. As a graduate student in social welfare at the University of Warsaw, Sendler publicly denounced the segregation of classrooms and defaced her non-Jewish identity card— earning her a suspension and a reputation for troublemaking.
Buoyed by her socialist ideals and inspired by her fellow social workers, Sendler assisted vulnerable Jewish families across Warsaw, pushing back on the waves of anti-Semitism surging through Europe. But in September 1939, Nazi Germany invaded Poland, bringing laws that further eroded Jewish rights. In 1940, Hitler announced that hundreds of thousands of Jews in Warsaw were to be forced into just over one square mile of land. Bordered by high walls and subject to constant surveillance, families living in the Warsaw Ghetto quickly became starving and sick.
Appalled, Sendler and her colleagues secured passes to the ghetto on the pretense of checking for typhus outbreaks. At first, her group worked to smuggle in resources with the help of sympathetic Polish officials and the medical underground. But as desperate parents began sending their children through sewers and over walls, it became clear that to help these people survive, Sendler needed to help them escape.
Sendler and her associates developed a coordinated campaign of rescue missions. Children were bundled into dirty laundry, packed into boxes on cargo trains, and carried beneath the Gestapo’s noses in coffins, toolboxes, and briefcases. Bigger children escaped through the courthouse and church, which straddled the ghetto’s boundaries.
Sendler helped ferry these children to safe houses, before forging them new documents and sending them to orphanages, convents, and foster families across Poland. To retain their Jewish identities and keep track of every child, Sendler kept painstaking records on thin cigarette paper and stored them in glass jars. This work was punishable by death. But for Sendler, such consequences paled in comparison to the pain of convincing parents to part with their children— often with no promise of a reunion.
In 1942, the Nazis began transporting Jews from the ghetto into concentration camps. Sendler worked with new urgency, joining forces with the Nazi resistance group called Zegota. Zegota helped Sendler expand her operation by stashing money for her in post boxes across Warsaw. But this system would also be Sendler’s downfall. When the Gestapo threatened a laundry owner whose business contained a Zegota post box, she gave them Sendler’s name.
At 3am on October 20th, the Gestapo burst into Sendler’s apartment, arresting her for aiding Jews throughout the country. The police had captured Sendler, but her records remained safe. Janina protected the children’s names with her life, all without knowing whether her friend would ever return.
Despite enduring months of physical and psychological torture, Sendler betrayed no information. Defiant to the end, she was sentenced to execution on January 20th, 1944. But as she walked to her death, a German officer diverted her course. Zegota had paid the Gestapo the modern equivalent of over $100,000 for Sendler’s release. That night as she listened to bullhorns proclaiming her death, Sendler’s work began anew. Remaining in hiding, she continued to oversee Zegota’s rescue missions until Germany’s defeat in 1945.
After the war, Sendler reconnected with the children she’d helped escape, remaining in contact with many for the rest of her life. And while the new Polish government sought to suppress her story, the children she rescued ensured she was recognized for her work. Yet despite all the lives she saved, Sendler remained hesitant to accept praise for her actions, remarking, “I continue to have qualms of conscience that I did so little.”
