In 1940, Irena Sendler was a Polish social worker in her early thirties, working with the city’s welfare department in Warsaw. When the Nazis walled the city’s Jewish population into the Warsaw Ghetto, sealing hundreds of thousands of people behind brick and barbed wire, her job gave her a pretext to go in. Officially she was there to check for disease. In fact, she began carrying in food and medicine and, before long, something far heavier: children.
Sendler was not a stranger to the people she helped. Her father had been a physician in Otwock, a town with a large Jewish community, and he had treated poor patients regardless of who they were. He died of typhus he caught while treating others, when she was a child. She said later that she had been raised to believe that a person in need is a person in need, whatever their religion or origin, and that this was the whole of her politics.
Between 1942 and 1943, Sendler worked with a network of about two dozen helpers, many of them women, to smuggle Jewish children out of the ghetto. The methods were as ordinary as they were terrifying. Children were carried out in ambulances, hidden under stretchers, in toolboxes and sacks, through the sewers, and through the courthouse that bordered the ghetto on one side and the Aryan city on the other. Babies were sedated so they would not cry. Older children were coached to say Catholic prayers in case they were stopped.
The children were given new names and placed with Polish families, convents, and orphanages willing to take them. But Sendler did something extra, something that would matter enormously later. She kept a record. On thin strips of paper, she wrote each child’s real name, their new name, and their family details, a list that in German hands would have been a death sentence for everyone involved.
She hid the lists in jars and buried them beneath a friend’s apple tree, in the garden, so that one day the children might learn who they really were.
In October 1943, the Gestapo arrested her. She was interrogated and tortured, and she never revealed the names or the network. She was sentenced to death. On the day she was to be executed, a guard escorting her was bribed by the underground resistance, and she was quietly released, her name already posted as executed. She spent the rest of the war in hiding, still working.
When the war ended, she dug up the jars and began the long, difficult work of matching children to whatever family remained. Many had none. She had saved roughly two thousand five hundred children, and for decades almost no one outside Poland knew her name.
She worked with Zegota, the underground council that aided Jews in occupied Poland, one of the few such organizations in wartime Europe. After the war, she tried to reunite the rescued children with surviving relatives. For some, relatives were found. For many, there was no one left. The records she had buried under the apple tree were, for those children, the only proof that they had ever had another name.
Recognition came slowly. In 1965, Yad Vashem, the Holocaust memorial in Israel, named her Righteous Among the Nations. In later life she was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize, widely reported, though the nomination itself has been disputed, and she never won. She said she had done nothing special, that she had only done what a person should.
What she did had a particular shape: she did not merely save lives. She saved identities. Anyone can hide a child. She chose to record who that child was, at a moment when erasing a name was the very point of the machine. She buried the names in the ground and trusted that the ground would outlast the war.
Irena Sendler died on 12 May 2008, at the age of ninety-eight. In her last years she was sometimes called a hero, and she disliked the word. Her own account was plainer: she kept a list, and she kept it safe. But keeping a list of people, when the world has decided they should not exist, is not a small thing. It is the oldest form of resistance there is, the refusal to let a name disappear.
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