An angel among demons

  Irena Sendlerowa or Irena Sendler 5  february 1910 - ib., 12 de may 2008 was a Polish nurse who helped save  two thousand five hundred Jewish children in Warsaw from being murdered by the Germans during World War II.

She led a group of about 20 people who helped hide these children in convents, orphanages and Polish families.

Irena Sendlerowa young

 Arrested, tortured and sentenced to death by the Gestapo in October 1943, she managed to escape on the day of her execution, and became head of the children's section of Żegota, the Polish council for aid to Jews. She was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize in 2007, made an honorary citizen of Israel and Righteous Among the Nations, and was awarded Poland's highest civilian honour by being made a Dame of the Order of the White Eagle.

In Warsaw, Sendler became a social worker, overseeing the city’s “canteens,” which provided assistance to people in need. When the Nazis invaded Poland in 1939, Sendler and her colleagues also used the canteens to provide medicine, clothing and other necessities to the city’s persecuted Jewish population.

Poland actually

In 1940, the Nazis forced Warsaw’s more than 400,000 Jewish residents into a small locked ghetto area, where thousands died every month from disease and starvation. As a social worker, Sendler was able to enter the ghetto regularly to help the residents and soon joined Żegota, the Council to Aid Jews. Putting themselves at great risk, she and about two dozen of her colleagues set out to save as many Jewish children as possible from death in the ghetto or deportation to concentration camps.

As the situation became more dire for the ghetto’s inhabitants, Sendler went beyond rescuing orphans and began asking parents to let her try to get their children to safety. Although she couldn’t guarantee the children’s survival, she could tell parents that their children would at least have a chance. Sendler kept detailed records and lists of the children she helped buried in a jar. Her plan was to reunite the rescued children and their parents after the war. However, most of the parents did not survive.

Irena Sendlerowa nurse

On October 20, 1943, the Nazis arrested Sendler and sent her to Pawiak Prison. There they tortured her, trying to get her to reveal the names of her associates. She refused and was sentenced to death. However, Żegota members bribed the prison guards, and Sendler was released in February 1944.

Sendler continued her work until the war ended, by which time she and her colleagues had rescued some 2,500 children. It has been estimated that Sendler personally saved about 400.

She began to take them out in ambulances as if they were typhus victims, but soon he resorted to all kinds of subterfuges to hide them: sacks, garbage baskets, tool boxes, loads of merchandise, bags of potatoes, coffins... in his hands any element became a means of escape.

Among the thousands of children and babies rescued, one example that went down in history was that of Elzbieta Ficowska. She was five months old when a Sendler aide gave her a narcotic and placed her in a wooden box with holes in it to allow air in. She was taken out of the ghetto with a load of bricks in a horse-drawn wagon in July 1942. Elzbieta's mother hid a silver spoon in her baby's clothes. The spoon was engraved with her nickname, Elzunia, and the date of her birth: 5 January 1942. Elzbieta was raised by Sendler's aide, Stanislawa Bussoldowa, a Catholic widow. Ficowska later said that the late Bussoldowa was her "Polish mother", to distinguish her from her "Jewish mother". For months, Elzunia's mother called on the phone to listen to her daughter's babbling. Years later, after her parents had died in the ghetto, young Elzbieta Ficowska became known by the nickname "the girl with the silver spoon."

“What helped us a lot during that time was the ambulance. I became friends with a driver, everything was secret. After his hours of service, he would go and look for the children he was trying to take to agreed places. It was terrible to see them separated from their families,” she said.

The nurse explained that this part of the mission was the most difficult, since many times the children could not adapt to the rescue means that were used, so they were exposed to being discovered at any moment.

“The driver prepared spaces in the ambulance to take them out, but they cried desperately, we could not put bags over their heads or give them sleeping pills. One day he told me that he wanted to leave us, because he could be discovered, I begged him not to do it and he soon found a solution: take a dog that barked a lot and step on its paw when passing by the guards. That worked,” she said.

After that she added: “All the time I had the feeling that I had not done enough, I could have done more. “This grief will haunt me until death,” he confessed.

In 1944, during the Warsaw Uprising, she placed her lists in two glass jars and buried them in her neighbor's garden to ensure that they would reach the right hands if she died. At the end of the war, she dug them up herself and gave the notes to Dr. Adolfo Berman, the first president of the Committee for the Rescue of Jewish Survivors.[

Irena Sendlerowa old

Unfortunately, most of the children's families had died in Nazi concentration camps. Initially, the children who did not have an adoptive family were cared for in different orphanages, and gradually they were sent to the British Mandate of Palestine.

In 1965, Yad Vashem, Israel’s Holocaust memorial organization, named Sendler as Righteous Among the Nations for her work saving Jewish children. In 2003, Poland honored her with its Order of the White Eagle. In 2008, Sendler was nominated for (but did not win) a Nobel Peace Prize. The story of her life was also captured in a 2009 TV movie The Courageous Heart of Irena Sendler, which starred Anna Paquin in the title role.

When we see those who have been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, some of whom are true genocidal and warmongering, and the refusal to award it to this wonderful person, we realize the falsity of the current world.