Here’s a lady who looked evil in the eye and spit.
A Polish woman credited with saving about 2,500 children during the Holocaust was awarded Poland’s highest order Monday. Irena Sendler, 93, ``risked her own life to rescue the lives of other people during the most brutal of wars,’’ President Aleksander Kwasniewski said in giving her the White Eagle Order. ``Thanks to people like you we believe that good can triumph, that a fragile woman is capable of defeating the greatest tyrants,’’ Kwasniewski said at a ceremony in a home for the elderly where Sendler has lived since last year.
Sendler was head of the children’s section in the Polish underground movement Zegota, which worked to rescue Jews during World War II. Anyone caught helping Jews in Nazi-occupied Poland risked being executed along with family members. Posing as a nurse, Sendler visited the Warsaw Ghetto and persuaded parents that their children had better chances of survival outside its walls. She and 20 helpers smuggled children out of the ghetto in 1942 and 1943 and placed them with Polish families. She wrote children’s names on slips of paper and buried them in jars in a neighbor’s yard as a record to help locate the children’s parents after the war. The Nazis arrested her in 1943, but she refused to reveal the names despite severe beatings.
Sendler, dressed in black and in a wheelchair, dedicated the medal to the people who helped her ``in those tragic years and who are no longer with us.’’ ``Every Jewish child that I helped save is a justification for my life,’’ she said. Sendler is credited with saving 2,500 children in all. Michal Glowinski, 69, who was saved along with his mother in 1943, said at the ceremony that he was ``extremely happy’’ about Sendler’s award but ``sad that it came so late.’’ Sendler sent him to an orphanage run by Catholic nuns in eastern Poland and placed his mother Felicja as a housekeeper with a teacher’s family near Warsaw. After World War II, Sendler worked as a social welfare clerk and director of vocational schools, continuing to help some of the children she rescued. Sendler won a medal from Israel’s Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial in the 1960s, and was recently given an award from the U.S.-based American Center of Polish Culture.
We need more people in the world like this. |