Another Hero Dies Without a Nobel Prize
Irena Sendler, a Polish social worker who smuggled 2,500 Jewish children out of the Warsaw ghetto, passed away over the weekend at the age of 98.
Records show Sendler’s team of some 20 people saved almost 2,500 children from the Warsaw Ghetto between October 1940 and April 1943, when the Nazis burned the ghetto, shooting the residents or sending them to death camps.
Under the pretext of inspecting the ghetto’s sanitary conditions during a typhoid outbreak, Sendler and her assistants entered in search of children who could be smuggled out and be given a chance to survive by living as Catholics.
Babies and small children were smuggled out in ambulances and in trams, sometimes wrapped up as packages. Teenagers escaped by joining teams of workers forced to labor outside the ghetto. They were placed in families, orphanages, hospitals or convents.In hopes of one day uniting the children with their families — most of whom perished in the Nazis’ death camps — Sendler wrote the children’s real names on slips of paper that she kept at home.
When German police came to arrest her in 1943, an assistant managed to hide the slips — which Sendler later buried in a jar under an apple tree in an associate’s yard. Some 2,500 names were recorded.
Her valor went unrecognized in her own homeland until recently when President Lech Kaczynski nominated her for the Nobel Peace Prize.
Unfortunately for Ms. Sendler she never got one because her accomplishment didn’t poke a thumb in the eye of the Bush Administration, so Al Gore, the IPCC, INTERNATIONAL ATOMIC ENERGY AGENCY and MOHAMED ELBARADEI, and of course, Jimmy Carter received the prize instead. Now since she’s dead, she’s no longer eligible – not that it would have mattered any since her legacy lives on through the thousands of people alive today thanks to her heroism.
Leave a comment