Monday, March 7, 2011

Irena Sendler

This video (below) is about Irena Sendler, the courageous Polish woman who saved more than 2500 Jewish babies and children from certain death by smuggling them out of the Warsaw ghetto. She gave the children new identities and kept lists of their original and new names buried in jars under an apple tree in her yard. After the war, she dug up the jars and tried to reunite the children with their parents, but almost all of their parents had been killed at Treblinka.

Irena was captured by the Nazis and tortured, having her arms, legs, and feet broken, but refused to divulge the locations of the children. Members of the Żegota underground rescued her as she was being taken to her execution.

Another tribute to Irena includes the song “This is God” by Phil Vassar. It’s worth watching, though there’s an unnecessary dig at Al Gore and global warming near the end, which spoils it somewhat. Irena Sendler was a life-saving angel, and a tribute to her is not the proper place to express feelings about politicans and doubts about climate science.

Irena was largely unknown to the world until 1999, when four high school students in Kansas wrote a play about her called “Life in a Jar”. The play has been performed 285 times across the United States, in Canada, and in Poland. To learn more, go to The Irena Sendler Project.

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