A WWII Hero That History Almost Forgot - Hero Passed Over for Gore by Nobel Committee

Reprint: Original Post October 15, 2007

Poland’s Upper House of Parliament passed a unanimous resolution to honor a WWII hero who helped save the lives of 2,500 Jewish children during the Nazi Holocaust. Her name is Irena Sendlerowa and she banded together with a group of social worker colleagues in 1940 to secretly rescue Jewish children from the Warsaw Ghetto.

Don’t be surprised if you haven’t heard of her; today’s Western press seems loathe to cover inconvenient stories of heroes who risked life and limb to save the Jews from the murderous hands of the Nazis. Compound that with the fact that this is a story that involves Catholic charity and you have all the elements necessary to relegate her accomplishments to a passing reference somewhere in the back of a newspaper, never again to inconvenience the Holocaust deniers or those who prefer to remember the war through the prism of Hollywood’s warped lens.

Mrs. Irena Sendlerowa had been actively giving the Jews aid, food and shelter since the war came to her doorstep in 1939. By the time the war ended almost all of Poland’s 3.5 million Jews had been wiped out and Sendlerowa had been captured, imprisoned, tortured and sentenced to death for her actions.

To leave the story there however would be a gross disservice to her memory. Like so many others who lived and died as citizens of history’s greatest generation, Irena Sendlerowa does not consider herself a hero.

In conclusion let me stress most emphatically that we who were rescuing children are not some kind of heroes. Indeed, that term irritates me greatly.

The opposite is true - I continue to have qualms of conscience that I did so little.

The truth of the matter however outweighs her humble grace. Irena Sendlerowa is a tremendous hero. The kind of person whose actions should be taught in schools and printed in papers. Her message is important.

The Nazis set up the Warsaw Ghetto in 1940 as a means to isolate the Jewish population. During this time a wave of muggings and increasingly violent attacks were launched on Jews by Polish gangs; many times in front of innocent bystanders who did nothing.

The Jews were rounded up and cordoned off in the ghetto where their food was inhumanely rationed along with medical aid and other basic human rights. The prisoners of the ghetto were not even allowed to school their children and many died as a result of starvation and disease. But the ghetto was just a layover for the Jews who survived its brutality; their ultimate destination would be the Nazi death camps.

Amidst all of that was a young 30 year old Irena Sendlerowa. Her Catholic upbringing had taught her to help people of all faiths and nationality. That kindness translated into a movement to rescue children using various schemes to secretly sneak the children out of the ghetto, provide false identification as gentile Poles and find places for them to live as orphans of the war. Many children who spoke only Yiddish had to be taught Polish to complete the ruse.

In 1942 the Polish underground set up the Council for Assistance for Jews and named Mrs. Sendlerowa as the head of the children’s department. The underground was called the Zegota and they waged a war against the Nazi’s until the underground was eventually defeated by the German armies.

Sendlerowa often told stories of the struggle to convince parents to give up their children.

It soon proved imperative to get children out on the so-called Aryan side since inside the ghetto it was hell.

We reached homes to say we could rescue children and lead them outside the ghetto walls. The basic question which then arose was: what guarantee could we give.

We had to admit honestly that we could give no guarantee since we did not even know whether we would succeed in leaving the ghetto today.

That was when we witnessed infernal scenes. Father agreed but mother didn’t. Grandmother cuddled the child most tenderly and, weeping bitterly, said “I won’t give away my grandchild at any price”.

We sometimes had to leave such unfortunate families without taking their children from them. I went there the next day to see what the whole building had come to and often found that everyone had been taken to the Umschlagsplatz railway siding for transport to death camps.

The tactics used to usher the children out of the ghetto were ingenious and perilous. To be caught would likely mean death for all. Various tricks such as hiding the children under ambulance stretchers, through secret passages in the courthouse, in the sewers and even hiding the children in suitcases. Everything was tried.

Yet getting them out of the ghetto was just the beginning of the journey. Sendlerowa personally cataloged the names of all the children with redundancy and buried the names and family origins in a jar so that the children would have some idea of their family history if they survived the war.

Often children would have to be moved. There was no end to the attempt to hunt them down and kill them.

I know of cases when the sole chance of survival was the external window-sill, behind a curtain, keeping the child there as long as necessary, holding on with numb hands so as not to fall, until the Germans left the home of his adopted parents.

The children paid dear for the “price of life”. A child sometimes had to be taken away from one “parents” and placed with others for their safety and that of the child.

I once carried such a tearful, broken-hearted little boy to other guardians when he asked me, crying and sobbing, “Please tell me how many Mums can you have, for this is the third one I’m going to”.

Irena Sendlerowa’s life nearly came to a common end in 1943 when the German Gestapo arrested her for her suspected involvement with Zegota. They tortured her and imprisoned her to gather information. During the harsh interrogations she suffered broken legs and feet and other brutal acts of torture that almost crippled her for life.

But Sendlerowa stuck to her story and was sentenced to be executed. Yet again this brave woman bucked the fate of so many others by escaping the firing squad and even fooling the Gestapo into proclaiming her death.

I cannot give a short description of what I experienced in the Gestapo cellars in Szucha Street and in Pawiak prison. The Pawiak museum contains a special cabinet with the instruments used by those “supermen” to torture prisoners. I still carry the marks on my body of what those “German supermen” did to me then. I was sentenced to death. “The Żegota” [Relief Council for Jews, working under the auspices of the Home Army] the Jewish underground aid organisation smuggled messages to me that I am not to worry for it is doing everything possible to get me out. The whole leadership of Żegota liked me very much and had great respect for my work. They spared no effort to find a way to have my death sentence rescinded.

Apart from any sentiments, there was also anxiety that the only trace of those children would disappear should I die.

It is beyond description to tell what you feel when travelling to your own execution and, at the last moment, to find you had been bought out. A Gestapo officer had let me out for a large bribe. I figured in their documents as having been killed by firing squad. But after two months incorrect records were found in their registers. The Gestapo bribe-taker was sent to the eastern front and the Gestapo again visited me, but unsuccessfully for after leaving Pawiak illegally I had to change all my documents and also never to be found at home.

I had to “steal” my dying mother from our home and take her to unknown persons until she ended her life several weeks later. The Gestapo was looking for me so obstinately that they were even at Mother’s funeral asking which is the dead woman’s daughter. Our friends replied “her daughter is in Pawiak prison”. To which a Gestapo functionary replied furiously: “Sure she was but inexplicably no longer is”. I continued working as the head of the children’s section of “Żegota” though using entirely changed personal documents.

After the war Sendlerowa helped put the pieces back together for the children she helped save. Most of the families they belonged to perished at the hands of the Nazi’s but generations live on as a monument to the bravery and courage of a young Catholic girl; a true living hero.

Irena Sendlerowa’s story is very important. We live in a day and age where memories have faded and anti-Zionist aggression is back on the rise.

I often wish that these WWII heroes hadn’t been so humble. Their accomplishments are often overshadowed by revisionist historians and hypocrites who have a displaced sense of moral outrage based on lies, ignorance and political expediency. Their ignorance casts a shadow on history’s most important lessons by muting the words that serve as a warning to future generations.

Irena Sendlerowa is aware of this fact even at the ripe old age of 97.

“But we and future generations must also remember the human cruelty and hate which led those who handed over their neighbours to the enemy, the hate which told them to commit murder. There was also indifference towards the tragedy of those who perished.

“It is my dream that this memory become a warning to the world and that humanity never experience such tragedy ever again.”

It seems much more convenient for the mainstream media to offer up excuses about disaffected terrorists and why they hate rather than cover examples of heroism and valor by a group of people who should truly be disaffected by today’s standards. Yet Sendlerowa’s generation somehow managed to rise above the scars of the gas chambers, firing squads and concentration camps. They survived as an example of what people can overcome when facing the most unimaginable adversity.

Irena Sendlerowa is a hero of the past and a messenger for the future. Her story is a lesson we should all take to heart and teach to our children.

Update: I haven’t gotten over being irate at the fact that Irena Sendlerowa was passed over for the Nobel prize in preference to Al Gore. However, when reflecting on the event I realize that Sendlerowa has struggled against hate and discrimination her whole life. It is unfortunate that her accomplishments have gone unrecognized by a group of anti-American elitists that feel recognition of partial truths and unsubstantiated claims are more important to honor than the life saving accomplishments of a 97 year old hero; a person without whom many Jewish Americans would not be alive today.

Noel Sheppard at NewsBusters notes that WWII hero Irena Sendlerowa (almost forgotten) was passed over by the mainstream media and the Nobel committee in favor of Al Gore. When comparing the accomplishments of the two it is painfully clear that we are in the middle of a culture war with a worldwide movement on the left.

… meet Irena Sendler, a 97-year-old Polish woman who saved 2,500 Jewish children from certain death in the Warsaw ghetto during World War II.

Hadn’t heard of her? Well, don’t feel bad, for since the Nobel Committee announced the nominees in February, there have only been 107 reports about Mrs. Sendler being one of them. By contrast, Al Gore and “Nobel” have been mentioned in 2,912.

[~snip]

As a post script, I wanted to point out some of the major media outlets in our nation that boycotted her nomination. A search of LexisNexis identified the following: The New York Times; USA Today; The Los Angeles Times; The Chicago Tribune; The San Francisco Chronicle; The Miami Herald; CNN (Beck’s report was on CNN Headline News); MSNBC; CBS; Fox News (only Prime Time broadcasts and Fox News Sunday are transcribed).

It’s a wonder that Americans of this generation and future ones even know about Hitler. Detractors on the left are quick to compare President Bush to Hitler, completely oblivious of the real horrors that occurred during WWII, the experiments on children, the torturing of the human body to study it’s effects, mass extermination by firing squads and then gassing entire families, men, women and children. Reinhard Heydrich and Heinrich Himmler are probably just names to a whole generation of people that have been systematically turned against the United States through errors of omission and overt advocacy by a crowd that cares little about reporting the full story, maintaining the true context of historical facts or honoring someone based on real accomplishments as opposed to the political machinations of the global warming industry.

Irena Sendlerowa, WWII, Holocaust, Holocaust denier, Hollywood, Warsaw Ghetto, Jews, Nazi, death camps, Polish, Gestapo    Sphere: Related Content

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