Irena Sendler - for Nobel peace prize

[Jaga]

High school project prompts Nobel nomination
Story by Liz Dodds (Contact)

4:53 p.m. Wednesday, December 13, 2006

A Pittsburg high school project that told the story of a Polish woman who saved thousands of children during the Holocaust has helped spark a Nobel Peace Prize nomination for the woman.

In 1999, a teacher at Uniontown High School suggested that four students research the life of Irena Sendler, who is credited with saving 2,500 Jewish children from the Warsaw ghetto in 1942 and '43.

The nomination is the latest step for teacher Norm Conrad and the students, who wrote a short play called "Life in a Jar" that depicted Sendler's life.

www.49abcnews.com/news/2006/dec/13/high_school_project_prompts_nobel_nomination/

[Jaga]

read her story and see her picture:

Holocaust heroine's survival tale
news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/4314145.stm

She is a Polish Catholic who risked her life to save Jews during the Holocaust.

For doing so, she was awarded the title of Righteous Among the Nations by Yad Vashem, Israel's Holocaust remembrance authority.

Unlike her fellow Righteous, German industrialist Oskar Schindler, who was immortalised in Steven Spielberg's film Schindler's List, few people have heard of Irena Sendlerowa.
...
At the time, Irena Sendlerowa was a 30-year-old nurse who worked for the city's health and care department. Since 1939 she had been taking enormous risks giving Jews food and shelter. The penalty for helping Jews in Nazi-occupied Poland was death. It was a threat that was often carried out.

But she recruited a group of her social worker colleagues to rescue children from the ghetto.

"I was brought up to believe that a person must be rescued when drowning, regardless of religion and nationality," she said.

Mrs Sendlerowa and a colleague, Irena Schultz, were allowed to enter the ghetto using special work passes. They smuggled children out in ambulances, through the sewers, or through a courthouse on the edge of the ghetto, which had a passage leading to the "Aryan" side.

Torn apart

In July 1942, the Nazis began the mass deportation of Warsaw's Jews to the Treblinka death camp in north east Poland. During that summer, 300,000 were murdered.


Jewish people in the ghetto rose up against the Nazis in 1943
Persuading parents to part with their loved ones was particularly traumatic. Mrs Sendlerowa could give no guarantee the child would survive.

[Jaga]

a bit more:
In December 1942, the Polish underground set up Zegota, the Council of Assistance for Jews. Mrs Sendlerowa became the head of its children's department. She had noted the names of all of the rescued children on cigarette papers and sealed them in two bottles.

Mrs Sendlerowa continued her work, but on 20 October 1943, she was arrested at her home. She was taken to the notorious Gestapo headquarters in central Warsaw and tortured. During the sessions they broke her legs and feet but she refused to reveal any names.
"I still carry the marks on my body of what those 'German supermen' did to me then. I was sentenced to death," she said.
...
Zegota managed to foil the plan after they bribed a Polish-speaking German officer with a large backpack full of dollars. On the drive to her execution site the officer knocked her unconscious. He stopped the car and left her bleeding on the roadside.

"It is beyond description to tell you what you feel when travelling to your own execution and, at the last moment, you find you have been bought out," she said.

The following day, unaware the execution had not taken place, the German authorities put up posters all over the city announcing she had been shot. Mrs Sendlerowa read them herself.

[Jaga]

the last fragment:
On 1 August 1944, the Polish underground rose up against the Germans in the Warsaw Rising. As the street fighting raged Mrs Sendlerowa buried the bottles containing the children's names in a colleague's garden. Against overwhelming odds and precious little help from Poland's allies, the underground fought on for 63 days before finally capitulating.

When the Red Army liberated Warsaw in January 1945, she dug up the bottles and handed over the lists to the Jewish Committee. The information was used to return the hidden children to any surviving relatives.

[pieter]

Incredible!

[pieter]

www.ifsw.org/en/p38000913.html?force_folder=038000059
www.polonianews.com/en/irena-sendler.php