Book Review – Irena’s Children – The Extraordinary Story of the Woman Who Saved 2,500 Children from the Warsaw Ghetto – A True Story of Courage – Tilar J. Mazzeo – Gallery Books, New York, 2016
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I have read many books on the Holocaust, but this is the first one I have read which centers specifically on the important story of one gentile woman’s lead in rescuing children from the Jewish ghetto in Warsaw during WWII.
This woman – Irena Sendler – and her creative and always dangerous efforts at organizing the rescue of Jewish children, began with the creation of the Warsaw ghetto in 1940 by the Germans, and continued with ever increasing intensity and risk throughout the prolonged Nazi program of the Final Solution in Poland. This program of extermination included the expropriation of Jewish businesses, property and wealth, economic exploitation through enslaved labor, starvation, deteriorating health services and rising typhus infections, deportations, brutal ghetto administration, and death by many ways – all falling hardest on the children, the most vulnerable, many now orphans, because of the death or separation from their parents.
Irena and her colleagues’ efforts and resistance continued all the way through the deportations of the Jews from the ghetto to the death camps, and the Jewish ghetto uprising and eventual destruction of the ghetto in 1943. And, then as the war turned against the Germans, Irena and those still surviving within the network of resistance, continued struggling to rescue children all through the German’s savage physical destruction of Warsaw and their attempted annihilation of the city’s Polish population as a whole in 1944.
Irena’s story is many times a difficult read, as it is a story about horrific times and brutal and torturous events. Well-written, it reads like a novel where you are literally anxious on the edge of your seat, reading about the rescue attempts – carefully sedated babies, young children suddenly speaking Yiddish on public transports, scared and tired adolescents, brave and creative teenagers risking their lives at times to help – and also reading the heart-rendering narratives of the children whose rescue attempts were not successful, regardless of how carefully planned, and strenuous and risky, and lengthy the efforts had been.
And all this dangerously played out against the background of the German’s brutal occupation of Warsaw and implementation of the Nazi’s long-planned final solution.
As stated in the book, “It was all part of a final solution that, however dimly conceived, had been inexorably set into motion before the fall of Warsaw. In that same directive, SS leader Reinhardt Heydrich reminded his henchmen in Warsaw that “the first prerequisite for the final aim is the concentration of Jews” in urban areas. Only “cities which are rail junctions should be selected as concentration points,” he informed his agents. Warsaw was one of the largest of all those crossroads. As soon as the local Jewish population of Warsaw was rounded up, refugees shipped in from other cities started arriving. … The result was more than a half million people forced to starve inside a walled and guarded district.” (Irena’s Children – pg. 60)
However, against and in opposition to the prerequisites of the Nazi final solution for the planned annihilation of Warsaw’s and Poland’s Jewish population – Shoah – is the essential enduring story of Irena Sendler and her organization of a brave and dedicated network of friends, neighbors, collogues, partners, and resistance collaborators to save as many Jewish children as possible.
Irena’s story begins as a child born to Polish gentile parents, whose father was a doctor, and though they lived in a spacious house in the village, Otwock, about fifteen miles outside of Warsaw, her father welcomed both the affluent and the poor to his practice, including poor Jews, who many Polish doctors refused to treat, his life, decisions, and treatment of the poor and the Jews, an overwhelming and lasting example of good in Irena’s life. As a result, Irena grew up with Jewish children as friends and was familiar with Jewish culture – and with the smell and taste of Jewish bread baking – and was able to speak, “a fluent backyard Yiddish” as a child.
The book then follows her life chronologically from childhood, with the tragic loss of her adored father to typhoid fever when she was seven, and the move away from the rustling pine trees of Otwock and cherished parts of her childhood, to growing up to early adulthood with her mother struggling to support herself and Irena.
The book then unfolds the changes to Irena’s life that began to chart and prepare the way for the full course of her future work and life. This began with her college days and her association with her favorite professor, Dr. Radlińska at the Polish Free University, who before the war had connected Irena with other like-minded young women pursuing degrees and careers in social welfare.
During the war, Dr. Radlińska, while hiding in a convent, initially to escape summary execution during the wholesale slaughter of Warsaw’s intelligentsia soon after the German takeover of Warsaw and Poland, would herself eventually figure prominently in the resistance against the Germans and as a continuing mentor and important asset for Irena’s work.
The narrative then follows the main intertangled threads of Irena’s life that formed the background and substance of Irena’s work. This included Irena’s marriage and romantic involvement with another man – the love of her life – the development of close friendships – almost kinships – during her university years before the war, and after the occupation of Warsaw, the necessary ceaseless development of important contacts, sometimes risky, with the larger resistance movement, both Jewish and Gentile.
Especially important, and vitally necessary, to the formation and functioning of the resistance network in rescuing Jewish children, was Irena’s career as a social worker and her position in Warsaw’s Department of Health and Social Services. Her position provided her with a pass permitting her to come and go from the ghetto as a health worker, giving her opportunities to help control typus among the children and others within the ghetto – help such as by smuggling into the ghetto, doses of typhus vaccination.
She also attempted to address other attendant medical issues, especially among the children, stemming from the enforced starvation within the ghetto – which then, for many, especially the orphans and those children reduced to living on the streets – rescue out of the ghetto became the obvious, and many times, the only solution, to their plight and chance of survival.
But also of immense logistic importance, her pass provided her with the ghetto-wide opportunity to contact and coordinate with and strengthen working links with resistance networks already working within the Jewish ghetto, and especially with those ghetto organizations specifically attempting to care for the children, such as the orphanage and other care institutions.
All of these factors helped add structure and resources to Irena’s organization of the work rescuing Jewish children. The bulk of the book then describes Irena Sendler’s perilous journey working through the official – and unofficial – work of her position at the health service office, and with her associates and network partners – several Jewish friends, Polish atheists, devout Catholics, Catholic priests, her old network of friends from college, and new contacts and assets encountered along the way – all focused on rescuing children of all ages from the Jewish ghetto and their assured eventual destruction if they remained within it.
After the war, in 1965, Yad Vashem awarded its highest honor to Irena and others working to rescue the children out of the Warsaw ghetto, and her name and the others were added to the list of those who are “Righteous Among the Nations”, an award, I believe, one of the highest of all honors and awards stemming from World War II.
However, the Communist government of Poland at that time did not allow Irena to travel to Jerusalem to accept the award, having always considered her “a decadent Western dissident and a public menace” for her wartime resistance work in rescuing the Jewish children, and her story and work was eventually lost and buried to many historians and writers – and thus to us, the general public – for decades.
It wasn’t until the 1990’s, after the end of the Cold War, that Irena’s story began to be told again in Poland, and interestingly enough, greatly helped along by the publication in the United States of Life in a Jar, a history project begun in 1999 by a group of three teenage girls and their high school teacher in Kansas, that focused specifically on Irena Sendler and included a play about her life that was performed in major American cities and eventually in Poland. (Life in a Jar – The Irena Sendler Project – Jack Mayer – First Published June 2005)
And as a few personal notes on this book and the life and work of Irena Sendler, it greatly testifies to me of the power of just doing what we can, and what our life has prepared us to at least attempt to do, and not waiting until a more “opportune” moment, or taking shelter in the thought that we are not good enough or sufficient for the task. For Irena’s life was not perfect – whose is? – for from the book:
“Irena’s love life was anarchic and unruly, and she struggled with the self-knowledge that she was not a good wife or a good daughter. She placed her frail and ailing mother in grave danger and kept the knowledge of those risks from her. … When the time came, she ultimately was a largely absent and distracted mother. She was at once a heroine – although she disdained that word, too – and a flawed and average person. But she was also someone gifted with a sense of purpose and righteousness so powerful that she was able, by her example, to persuade others around her to be better than they otherwise might have been, and to do something together amazingly decent and courageous.” (Irena’s Children – pg. xii)
We are all flawed, broken, and much less than perfect individuals, but to me, those who achieve a greatness in their care and service towards humankind, are those who recognize and face the truth of their own condition – humility – and yet begin to go on to do what they can, and continue to go on – regardless of what inner and external hurdles and dangers exist – and then persist in their efforts.
A statement from the Jewish Talmud declares that “whoever saves a single life is considered by scripture to have saved the whole world” based on the Genesis account (Genesis 1:26-27) that every single human is created in the image and likeness of God, and as such has infinite and lasting value as the embodiment of God’s special creation. This belief is equally shared in the Christian community, with the added belief by many, that each person is also the distinct object of the fullness of God’s love, and eminently worthy of care and protection and rescue from the evil and hatred of godless men, as proclaimed in the Two Great Commandments enjoined upon us by both Jewish and Christian religious tenets of belief, of loving God with our whole mind, heart, and strength, and loving our neighbor as ourselves.
I see the life of Irena Sendler, and those associated with her in her work, as examples of placing infinite value on even just the single life of one Jewish child. Because for the most part, they saved the children one by one, or in small groups of two or three – during a time when Nazi ideology considered Jews as a whole as subhuman, basically unworthy of life, and only worthy of extinction – with an ideological focus specifically on the children as a threat because of the possibility of them surviving and growing up to avenge the murder and destruction of their parents and family .
Now the rescue of 2500 Jewish children from the Warsaw ghetto is truly a small number compared to the total number of children who perished in the ghetto during the Holocaust – but 2500 Jewish children are still and always will be 2500. But in saving these children, one by one, and two by two, always constrained by the equally important and arduous task of finding and transporting them to save places of refuge – in view of the six million Jewish men, women, and children slaughtered in the Holocaust – these 2500 children, and all those Jews who survived the Nazi genocidal final solution, added to the foundation of present-day Israel and of the Jewish people and culture worldwide, literally helping to save and rebuild the Jews as a nation and a people.
Then as far as saving the world, they did that also. For in giving us an example of such work in the face of horrible and brutal oppression and murder – in which many of those involved in this work with Irena perished horribly – they gave a testimony to us all, to which we must listen and take to heart. For we are also responsible before God to think, work and speak, and do, so that this never happens again in whatever manifestation it takes, or upon whoever or wherever it again surfaces and attempts to take root. And this struggle may come to be within our own community, province or state, or nation, or even within our own individual heart.
Finally, to end this review, I believe the best way is to quote the last three lines of her story from the book:
On her gravestone are only the dates of her life and the names of her parents. But if we could choose a more elaborate epitaph, perhaps we would engrave the words of Mahatma Gandhi, who once said, “A small body of determined spirits fired by an unquenchable faith in their mission can alter the course of history.” Such were Irena and all her friends, and this is their story. (Irena’s children – page 263)
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