Screening of The Story of Irena Sendler in Strasbourg
A film depicting Irena Sendler, a Polish nurse who saved the lives of some 2,500 Jewish children during the WWII German occupation, will be shown on Wednesday at the Council of Europe's seat in Strasbourg, the Polish Film Institute (PISF) has announced.
“The film’s premiere in Strasbourg is owed to Hanna Machinska, director of the Council of Europe Office in Warsaw” says Andrzej Wolf, director of the film.
Andrzej Wolf is a director, camera operator and lecturer at Warsaw Film School (WSF). He interviewed Sendler for the last four years of her life. From nine hours of recorded conversations Wolf created 27-minute long document, with inserted staged scenes. “This is a shocking story of life and death of Jews in the ghetto. It shows desperate attempts to save at least some of those, who, according to German terror, had to die,” said WSF.
„Irena Sendler’s dream, expressed in the film, was that the memory of Holocaust became a warning for the world and that such horrible events would never happen again” – stresses WSF as it describes the film.
The music to the picture was composed by Michal Lorenc and some of the footage used in it comes from Steven Spielberg’s archives.
„I made this film so that next generations learnt about those not-so-distant tragic times and so that the story shown became a warning. I want to demonstrate where intolerance, lack of respect and antisemitism lead to, but also I want to show righteous people, heroes ready to risk their own lives in order to help the persecuted and the hurt.” said Andrzej Wolf after finishing the film.
Irena Sendler was born in 1910, She worked for the Polish Council for Aid to Jews, an underground organisation also know as “Zegota”. As an employee of the Social Welfare Department, Irena Sendler had a special permit to enter the Warsaw Ghetto to check for signs of typhus, a disease the Germans feared would spread beyond the ghetto. Under the pretext of conducting inspections of sanitary conditions within the ghetto, Sendler and her co-workers smuggled out 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.
Irena Sendler was arrested and sentenced to death in 1943. She was saved by “Zegota”, which bribed German guards. Living in hiding in Warsaw she then continued her efforts to save Jewish children. During the Warsaw Uprising she was a nurse.
After the war, Sendler continued her social work. In 1965 she was recognized by Yad Vashem as one of the Polish Righteous among the Nations. In 2003 she received Order of the White Eagle, Poland's highest civilian decoration. Sendler died on May 28, 2008.
Wednesday, January 27 marks the 71th anniversary of liberation of the Nazi German concentration camp Auschwitz. The International Holocaust Remembrance Day is commemorated the world over on that day. (PAP)
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