Polish President says Irena Sendler is a great heroine
"Irena Sendler is a monumental figure, she achieved a magnificent feat - for Poland and for life," Polish President Andrzej Duda said on Thursday after he laid a wreath at a plaque commemorating the Pole who saved hundreds of Jewish children from the Warsaw Ghetto.
"This is a great heroine, a woman who saved thousands of children during the Second World War, and who can be described as a monumental figure. Magnificent. Working together with Zofia Kossak-Szczucka in Zegota - the Council to Aid Jews, Sendler achieved a great feat - for Poland and for life," the president said during a ceremony marking the 108th anniversary of her birthday.
The president reminded listeners that Irena Sendler had been awarded the Righteous among the Nations of the World medal and had a tree dedicated to her at the Yad Vashem Institute. "We must remember her as this was a great person, an absolutely great figure," he stressed.
Irena Sendler was a Polish social worker who saved hundreds of Jewish children from the Warsaw Ghetto during the Nazi German occupation. Sendler was born in 1910. In 1942, she joined Zegota - the Council to Aid Jews, an underground organisation in German-occupied Poland set up to help Polish citizens of Jewish descent. Poland was the only country in occupied Europe where such an organisation existed.
As a social welfare worker, Sendler had a special permit to enter the Warsaw Ghetto to check for signs of typhus. Under the pretext of conducting inspections of sanitary conditions within the ghetto, Sendler and her co-workers successfully smuggled out almost 2,500 babies and small children, sometimes in ambulances and trams, sometimes hiding them in packages and suitcases, and using various other means. These children were then placed under false names with Polish families or orphanages run by nuns. Sendler encrypted and recorded their real names and kept them buried in jars. After the war, the list of names was decrypted and handed over to the Central Committee of Jews in Poland.
Sendler was arrested by the Nazis on October 20, 1943. Sentenced to death, she was saved at the last minute when Zegota members bribed one of the Germans to halt the execution.
Living in hiding in Warsaw, she then continued her efforts to save Jewish children. During the 1944 Warsaw Uprising she was a nurse.
The world first heard about Sendler in the 1990s, mainly owing to a US school play entitled Life in a Jar, which was based on facts from Sendler's life. The play, inspired by teacher Norman Conard from Uniontown, Kansas, won broad acclaim in US media and led to the establishment of the Life in a Jar Foundation, which promotes Sendler's heroic wartime stance.
Sendler was awarded Poland's highest state decoration, the Order of the White Eagle, in 2003. She died in 2008 at the age of 98. (PAP)
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