Sendler was a 29-year-old social worker in Warsaw when World War II began in 1939. The following year, the Nazis forced Warsaw’s Jews into the ghetto, and Sendler began using her position and connections to smuggle food and money to them.
She joined Zegota, the underground, state-sponsored Council for Aid to Jews, which formed in 1942. Zegota helped hide Polish Jews from Hitler’s regime, in addition to providing them with food, financial assistance, forged documents, and medical care. As head of Zegota’s children’s section in 1943, Sendler focused her efforts on getting babies and children to safety.
Between 1940 and 1943, most of the Jews in the Warsaw ghetto were killed. Tens of thousands died of starvation and disease in the dirty, overcrowded conditions. Around 265,000 were sent to the Treblinka extermination camp in 1942. An uprising of resistors resulted in the destruction of what remained of the ghetto and the deportation of whoever was left in May of 1943.
In the midst of all of that chaos and killing, Irena Sendler and her companions focused on smuggling babies and children out of the Warsaw ghetto.
Sendler entered the ghetto to help by obtaining a pass to monitor health conditions. "German authorities were afraid of being exposed to deadly diseases like typhus and tuberculosis," historian Dr. Ewa Wampuszyc shares in a video interview. "These were diseases that were actually caused by the ghettos that they themselves had created."
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Irena Sendler 08/18/2008 Nobel Peace Prize. Irena Sendler or Al Gore? You decide.
Irena Sendler 05/13/2008 Polish Holocaust hero Irena Sendler dies at age 98
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