In 1942, the Warsaw Ghetto was a sealed, overcrowded death trap. Over 400,000 people were crammed into a few square miles. Starvation and disease killed thousands weekly, and deportations to Treblinka had begun. It was into this world that Irena Sendler walked, carrying a toolbox.
Sendler was 32 years old, a Polish Catholic social worker with a permit to enter the ghetto under the pretext of conducting welfare inspections. She had no illusions about what was happening. Through her work with a clandestine group called Zegota (the Council to Aid Jews), she began organizing the removal of children from the ghetto.
The methods were improvised and desperate. Infants were sedated with drugs and hidden in toolboxes, sacks, and coffins — carried past German guards in ambulances and work vehicles. Older children were coached to walk calmly through checkpoints or crawled through gaps in the wall. One of Sendler's colleagues trained a dog to bark on command, covering the sounds of children during particularly dangerous moments.
Each child was placed with a Polish family or in a convent or orphanage with a new Christian identity. But Sendler recorded every child's real name, their original family, and their new placement — on cigarette paper, in two glass jars buried under an apple tree in a colleague's garden. She intended to reunite the children with their parents after the war.
In October 1943, the Gestapo arrested Sendler. During her interrogation, they broke both her legs and both her feet trying to force her to reveal the names of her network. She revealed nothing. She was sentenced to execution.
Zegota bribed Gestapo officers and she was released — officially listed as executed, actually smuggled out under a false name. She continued working from underground. When the war ended, she dug up the jars.
Most of the parents were dead, killed in the camps. The majority of children she had saved would never know who they really were. Sendler tried to track down as many as she could, working with the children's records for years after the war.
For decades she received little recognition. The communist Polish government was not eager to celebrate heroes associated with the non-communist wartime resistance. It was American high school students in Kansas — working on a history project in 1999 — who brought her story to international attention with a play called "Life in a Jar." Sendler was in her nineties, still alive in Warsaw, still sharp of mind. She lived to see herself recognized, receiving Poland's highest honor in 2003. She died in 2008 at the age of 98.