Irena Sendler

Irena Stanisława Sendler (Krzyżanowska), also referred to as Irena Sendlerowa in Poland, nom de guerre Jolanta (15 February 1910 – 12 May 2008), was a Polish humanitarian, social worker, and nurse who served in the Polish Underground Resistance during World War II in German-occupied Warsaw.

Sendler was born on 15 February 1910 in Warsaw, to Stanisław Henryk Krzyżanowski, a physician, and his wife, Janina Karolina (née Grzybowska).

She was baptized Irena Stanisława on 2 February 1917 in Otwock.

She initially grew up in Otwock, a town about 15 miles southeast of Warsaw, where there was a Jewish community.

Her father, a humanitarian who treated the very poor, including Jews, free of charge, died in February 1917 from typhus contracted from his patients.

After his death, the Jewish community offered financial help for the widow and her daughter, though Janina Krzyżanowska declined their assistance.

Afterwards she lived in Tarczyn and Piotrków Trybunalski.

From 1927, Sendler studied law for two years and then Polish literature at the University of Warsaw, interrupting her studies for several years from 1932 to 1937.

Sendler joined the Union of Polish Democratic Youth (Związek Polskiej Młodzieży Demokratycznej) in 1928; during the war she became a member of the Polish Socialist Party (PPS).

She was repeatedly refused employment in the Warsaw school system because of negative recommendations issued by the university, which ascribed radically leftist views to her.

Sendler became associated with social and educational units of the Free Polish University (Wolna Wszechnica Polska), where she met and was influenced by activists from the illegal Communist Party of Poland.

At Wszechnica Sendler belonged to a group of social workers led by Professor Helena Radlińska; a dozen or more women from that circle would later engage in rescuing Jews.

From her social work on-site interviews Sendler recalled many cases of extreme poverty that she encountered among the Jewish population of Warsaw.

Sendler was employed in a legal counseling and social help clinic, the Section for Mother and Child Assistance at the Citizen Committee for Helping the Unemployed.

In the 1930s, Sendler conducted her social work as one of the activists connected to the Free Polish University.

She opposed the ghetto benches system practiced in the 1930s at many Polish institutions of higher learning (from 1937 at the University of Warsaw) and defaced the "non-Jewish" identification on her grade card.

She reported having suffered from academic disciplinary measures because of her activities and reputation as a communist and philo-Semite.

By the outbreak of World War II she submitted her magister degree thesis, but had not taken the final exams.

Sendler married Mieczysław Sendler in 1931.

She published two pieces in 1934, both concerned with the situation of children born out of wedlock and their mothers.

She worked mostly in the field, crisscrossing Warsaw's impoverished neighborhoods, and her clients were helpless, socially disadvantaged women.

From 1935 to October 1943, she worked for the Department of Social Welfare and Public Health of the City of Warsaw.

During the war she pursued conspiratorial activities, such as rescuing Jews, primarily as part of the network of workers and volunteers from that department, mostly women.

Sendler participated, with dozens of others, in smuggling Jewish children out of the Warsaw Ghetto and then providing them with false identity documents and shelter with willing Polish families or in orphanages and other care facilities, including Catholic nun convents, saving those children from the Holocaust.

In 1935, the government abolished the section.

Many of its members became employees of the City of Warsaw, including Sendler in the Department of Social Welfare and Public Health.

He was mobilized for war, captured as a soldier in September 1939 and remained in a German prisoner of war camp until 1945; they divorced in 1947.

Soon after the German invasion, on 1 September 1939, the German occupation authorities ordered Jews removed from the staff of the municipal Social Welfare Department where Sendler worked and barred the department from providing any assistance to Warsaw's Jewish citizens.

Sendler with her colleagues and activists from the department's PPS cell became involved in helping the wounded and sick Polish soldiers.

On Sendler's initiative the cell began generating false medical documents, needed by the soldiers and poor families to obtain aid.

From October 1943 she was head of the children's section of Żegota, the Polish Council to Aid Jews (Rada Pomocy Żydom).

The German occupiers suspected Sendler's involvement in the Polish Underground and in October 1943 she was arrested by the Gestapo, but she managed to hide the list of the names and locations of the rescued Jewish children, preventing this information from falling into the hands of the Gestapo.

Withstanding torture and imprisonment, Sendler never revealed anything about her work or the location of the saved children.

She was sentenced to death but narrowly escaped on the day of her scheduled execution, after Żegota bribed German officials to obtain her release.

In post-war communist Poland, Sendler continued her social activism but also pursued a government career.

Among the many decorations Sendler received were the Gold Cross of Merit granted her in 1946 for the saving of Jews and the Order of the White Eagle, Poland's highest honour, awarded late in Sendler's life for her wartime humanitarian efforts.

In 1957 Zgrzembski left the family; he died in 1961 and Irena remarried her first husband, Mieczysław Sendler.

Ten years later they divorced again.

In 1965, she was recognised by the State of Israel as Righteous Among the Nations.

She then married Stefan Zgrzembski (born Adam Celnikier), a Jewish friend and wartime companion, by whom she had three children, Janina, Andrzej (who died in infancy), and Adam (who died of heart failure in 1999).