How to make a cheap political point out someone’s bravery
Irena Sendler
I received an email from a friend: one of those circular, viral emails – this one was about Irena Sendler. Irena (real name Sendlerowa) was an exceptionally brave woman – she, along with a couple of dozen others in the Warsaw RGO managed to smuggle out about two and half thousand Jewish children, who would have probably ended up being killed by the Nazis.
Indeed Irena was herself nearly executed. In 1943 Sendler was arrested by the Gestapo, severely tortured, and sentenced to death. Żegota – the Council to Aid Jews – saved her by bribing German guards on the way to her execution. She was left in the woods, unconscious and with broken arms and legs. She was listed on public bulletin boards as among those executed.
For the remainder of the war, she lived in hiding, but continued her work for the Jewish children. After the war, she dug up the jars containing the children’s identities and attempted to find the children and return them to their parents. However, almost all of their parents had been killed at the Treblinka extermination camp or had gone missing otherwise.
The email I received got some of this correct, some of it incorrect:
Irena Sendler – who recently died at 98 years of age, was a 2007 Nobel Peace Prize Nominee;
During WWII, Irena was given permission to work in the Warsaw Ghetto, as a plumbing/sewer specialist. She had an ulterior motive.
Being German, Irena knew what the Nazi plan was for Jews.
Irena smuggled out infants in the bottom of a tool box she carried in the back of her truck. She used a burlap sack for bigger children.
She also had a dog in the back that she trained to bark when Nazi soldiers let her in and out of the ghetto. The soldiers wanted nothing to do with her dog. The barking covered noises of the infants and children.
Irena managed to smuggle out and save 2500 infants and children, before she was caught! The Nazi’s broke both her legs and arms, and beat her severely.
Irena kept a record in a jar buried under a tree in her back yard of all the children she smuggled out.
After the war, she tried to locate all parents that may have survived to reunite families, but most had been gassed.
The children she could not reunite were placed with foster families or adopted.
Irena was nominated for the 2008 Nobel Peace Prize.
She was not selected.
Al Gore won for a slide show on Global Warming!!!!????.
Help send this email around the world so that this ‘noble’ lady is remembered for her bravery.
The spelling mantra that generations of schoolchildren have learned — “i before e, except after c”, is being abandoned in the UK. New British government guidance tells teachers not to pass on the rule to students, because there are too many exceptions.
Jay sat in my living room sipping his cooling cup of tea. Had we passed in the street I would probably not recognised the tall, almost gangly, bespectacled figure, his loose blue cotton shirt flapping around him like the sails of an improbable yacht, mast thin legs striding in that peculiarly purposeful way that spoke of pursuit rather than destination. This should not surprise me, for we had not seen each other in thirty years. When he left University, the proud bearer of a stellar first class honours degree in really hard maths, in contrast to my lucky second, our paths diverged – he went to Harvard, completed a PhD in even harder maths, then secured tenure and has been there ever since. I messed around for twenty years thinking about doing a Masters. Now here he was, sitting on my chair, asking a favour.