Irena Sendler

Irena Sendler

There recently was a death of a 98 year-old lady named Irena. During WWII, Irena, got permission to work in the WarsawGhetto, as a Plumbing/Sewer specialist. She had an ‘ulterior motive’ …. She KNEW what the Nazi’s plans were for the Jews, (being German.) Irena smuggled infants out in the bottom of the tool box she carried and she carried in the back of her truck a burlap sack, (for larger kids..) She also had a dog in the back that she trained to bark when the Nazi soldiers let her in and out of the ghetto. The soldiers of course wanted nothing to do with the dog and the barking covered the kids/infants noises.. During her time of doing this, she managed to smuggle out and save 2500 kids/infants. She was caught, and the Nazi’s broke both her legs, arms and beat her severely. Irena kept a record of the names of all the kids she smuggled out and kept them in a glass jar, buried under a tree in her back yard. After the war, she tried to locate any parents that may have survived it and reunited the family. Most had been gassed. Those kids she helped got placed into foster family homes or adopted.

My aunt had forwarded me the heroic and touching story of Irena Sendler.  I would like to share her story with you today.

All information was taken directly from the emal that has been circulating across the country.

Photo Taken From Forwarded Email

There recently was a death of a 98 year-old lady named Irena. During WWII, Irena, got permission to work in the WarsawGhetto, as a Plumbing/Sewer specialist. She had an ‘ulterior motive’ … She KNEW what the Nazi’s plans were for the Jews, (being German.) Irena smuggled infants out in the bottom of the tool box she carried and she carried in the back of her truck a burlap sack, (for larger kids..) She also had a dog in the back that she trained to bark when the Nazi soldiers let her in and out of the ghetto. The soldiers of course wanted nothing to do with the dog and the barking covered the kids/infants noises.. During her time of doing this, she managed to smuggle out and save 2500 kids/infants. She was caught, and the Nazi’s broke both her legs, arms and beat her severely. Irena kept a record of the names of all the kids she smuggled out and kept them in a glass jar, buried under a tree in her back yard. After the war, she tried to locate any parents that may have survived it and reunited the family. Most had been gassed. Those kids she helped got placed into foster family homes or adopted.

Irena 63 years after her heroic act...taken from forwarded email

Have you ever heard the story of Irena Sendler? Probably not.  She actually was a candidate for the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize.  She lost to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and former former VP Al Gore “for their efforts to build up and disseminate greater knowledge about man-made climate change, and to lay the foundations for the measures that are needed to counteract such change.” Read the article below and see if you think she did more to work for peace than did those who received the Peace prize that year as well as this year’s award.

According to Sender’s May 13, 2008, Los Angeles Times obituary:

Irena Sendler, a Polish Catholic social worker whose ingenuity and daring saved 2,500 Jewish children from extermination in the Holocaust, a feat that went largely unrecognized for 60 years, died yesterday in Warsaw. She was 98….

Ms. Sendler has been called the female Oskar Schindler, but she saved twice as many lives as the German industrialist who sheltered 1,200 of his Jewish workers. But unlike Schindler, whose story received international attention in the 1993 movie Schindler’s List, Ms. Sendler and her heroic actions were almost lost to history until 4 KS schoolgirls wrote a play about her 9 years ago….

She studied at Warsaw University and was a social worker when the German occupation of Poland began in 1939. In 1940, after the Nazis herded Jews into the ghetto and built a wall separating it from the rest of Warsaw, disease, especially typhoid, ran rampant. Social workers were not allowed inside the ghetto, but Ms. Sendler, imagining “the horror of life behind the walls,” obtained fake identification and passed herself off as a sanitary worker, allowed to bring in food, clothes, and medicine.

By 1942, when the deadly intentions of the Nazis became clear, Ms. Sendler joined a Polish underground organization, Zegota, recruited 10 of her closest friends – a group that would eventually grow to 25, all but one of them women – and began rescuing Jewish children.

They smuggled the children out in boxes, suitcases, sacks, and coffins, sedating babies to prevent their cries. Some were spirited away through a network of basements and secret passages. Operations were timed to the second. One of Sendler’s children told of waiting by a gate in darkness as a German soldier patrolled nearby. When the soldier passed, the boy counted to 30, then made a mad dash to the middle of the street, where a manhole cover opened and he was taken down into the sewers and eventually to safety.

Most of the children who left with Ms. Sendler’s group were taken into Catholic convents, orphanages, and homes and given non-Jewish aliases. In the hope that she could reunite them with their families later, Ms. Sendler recorded their true names on thin rolls of paper. She preserved the precious scraps in jars and buried them in a friend’s garden.

She was captured by the Nazis in 1943 and tortured but refused to tell her captors who her co-conspirators were or where the bottles were buried. She also resisted in other ways…. [W]hen Sendler worked in the prison laundry, she and her co-workers made holes in the German soldiers’ underwear. When the officers discovered what they had done, they lined up all the women and shot every other one. It was just one of many close calls for Sendler.

During one particularly brutal torture session, her captors broke her feet and legs and she passed out. When she awoke, a Gestapo officer told her he had accepted a bribe from her comrades in the resistance to help her escape. With her name on a list of executed prisoners, Ms. Sendler went into hiding but continued her rescue efforts….

When the war ended, Ms. Sendler unearthed the jars and began trying to return the children to their families. For the vast majority, there was no family left. Many of the children were adopted by Polish families, and others were sent to Israel….

(HT:  Jill Stanek)

An extremely altruistic event measured against the multiculturalism with no accomplishment to speak of, speaks volumes about the state of the American mindset and its willful ignorance to ignore the lessons of the past. Neville Chamberlain comes to mind as well as an assortment of other characters and events through out history who have looked the other way,while oppressed people suffer.The ongoing oppression of women in the middle east, the genocide in Africa, Sudan in particular and the unbridled drug war consuming our southernmost border with Mexico and has put America on a collision course with destiny. our fate will depend on our ability to tolerate immoral and treacherous man occupying our most prized possession. Liberals hate whats pure and exceptional about America. Historians may well see us as a has been superpower who elected a Manchurian candidate to subvert the constitution for political and personal gain. Mr. Obama should suffer the fate of the knowles!
Just realize that this prize has this legacy from 2007…

Al Gore wins Nobel Prize over woman who saved 2,500 lives

Warsaw, Poland – Irena Sendler – credited with saving some 2,500 Jewish children from the Nazi Holocaust by smuggling them out of the Warsaw Ghetto, some of them in baskets – died Monday, her family said. She was 98.

Sendler was a 29-year-old social worker with the city’s welfare department when Germany invaded Poland in September 1939, launching World War II. Warsaw’s Jews were forced into a walled-off ghetto.
Seeking to save the ghetto’s children, Sendler masterminded risky rescue operations. Under the pretext of inspecting sanitary conditions during a typhoid outbreak, she and her assistants ventured inside the ghetto – and smuggled out babies and small children in ambulances and in trams, sometimes wrapped up as packages.

Teenagers escaped by joining teams of workers forced to labor outside the ghetto. They were placed in families, orphanages, hospitals or convents.

Records show that Sendler’s team of about 20 people saved nearly 2,500 children from the Warsaw Ghetto between October 1940 and its final liquidation in April 1943, when the Nazis burned the ghetto, shooting the residents or sending them to death camps.

In hopes of one day uniting the children with their families – most of whom perished in the Nazis’ death camps, Sendler wrote the children’s real names on slips of paper that she kept at home.

When German police came to arrest her in 1943, an assistant managed to hide the slips, which Sendler later buried in a jar under an apple tree in an associate’s yard. Some 2,500 names were recorded.

Anyone caught helping Jews in Nazi-occupied Poland risked being summarily shot, along with family members – a fate Sendler only barely escaped herself after the 1943 raid by the Gestapo. The Nazis took her to the notorious Pawiak prison, which few people left alive. Gestapo agents tortured her repeatedly, leaving Sendler with scars on her body – but she refused to betray her team. Zegota, an underground organization helping Jews, paid a bribe to German guards to free her from the prison. Under a different name, she continued her work.

After World War II, Sendler continued to assist some of the children she rescued.

Irena Sendler was nominated for the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize, but did not win. The winner was Al Gore who narrated a slide show.

Now, I concede that Obama has done two things RIGHT in his highly screwed up term…

(July 20, 2009 - Photo by Mark Wilson/Getty Images North America)

 

Conservatives vs Liberals
Unlike liberals, who get off on hating, insulting, and protesting anything and anyone with smugness and disgust, the past few months have been difficult for conservatives.  No.  Really.  We had eight solid years of being force-fed bitterness from the left daily, and all while we too disagreed with much of what our President was doing.  However, we were told to shut-up, because we were mindless robots obeying our dictator anyways.  Right? Oh, you don’t remember that now?

Our issues with Bush
We questioned Bush’s loyalty to Rumsfeld during the Iraq war.  As generals asked for more troops to bring a solid peace faster by containing “insurgents” (which are imported terrorists, really), and as the President promised us the generals on the ground were in control of both war fronts, Rumsfeld silenced the generals.  Hard to guarantee a war is being fought expeditiously when the left came out of their field, not with “Rumsfeld is single-handedly destroying our over-seas efforts” but with “This war’s illegal” or “No blood for Oil”.  Nevermind the European countries behind the curtain that had secret deals for oil with Hussein that illegally broke the U.N. “food for oil” sanctions on Iraq–which all happened to be the same countries propelling the “illegal war” charge with the U.S.’s left.  Many a conservative was thrilled to see Rumsfeld released from his duties!  I blame liberals and their refusal to cooperate with conservatives for it taking six years.

We were frustrated with Bush pushing the “No Child Left Behind Act ” as he let Congress allow states to work around it.  Again, difficult to keep under-achieving schools and teachers accountable for the sake of the children when teacher’s unions and politicians found ways to work around the new standards–which has led to the continued decline in students’ progress.

Bush never wavered from his message on the importance of our fight against terrorism (which we agreed with).  However, he kept the Mexican border wide open, which kept our heads scratching…especially when the I.C.E. and I.N.S. were still under-performing.  His administration seemed to target the border patrol and minute-men for working against the President, when they were simply doing their jobs!  Now we face fights on amnesty for illegal border-crossers and free healthcare for them.

And finally, in W’s last days, he completely fell off the right’s wagon by giving heed to Paulson’s crazy economic advice.  Then, with the help of lefty-loons Reid & Pelosi, he signed the insane TARP deal, which opened a can of legislative and financial worms no one with an understanding of our Constitution or a calculator could defend.  Who was it, Benjamin Franklin (?) that said, (paraphrasing) ”Once the people realize they can legislate themselves money, the republic will be doomed”?  If you’re a lefty, go look it up!  Like all conservatives, I’m sick of doing your homework!

Conservatives’ Distrust Begins
Instead of the entire nation finding ways to keep our President accountable for his message versus his actions together, we were kept polarized by liberals picking insane fights.  Having all media agencies focus on a 40-person protest in Texas for months, conducted by a mother that was really wrestling with the memory of a heroic son she never understood, withdrew our trust from the nightly news.  Then, there was that whole fake document debacle.  Oh, and then the sold-out blind reporting of one single democratic candidate that could be categorized as anything except objective during a solid year’s campaigning. 

Watching members of Congress sneak in emotionally unstable women dressed in pink shirts to sabotage the President’s speeches left us speechless with our Representatives’ and Senators’ open lack of common decency and manipulation to reject our governments’ protocols and procedures by using someone else’s kooky voice.  And every area of entertainment and print media attacked the President and his administration based on presumptive lies.  This kept us home from the movies or buying newspapers: two industries now financially suffering, and currently begging this liberal Congress for bail-outs.

Now that the White House, all of Congress, media, and entertainment are owned by the left, conservatives and President Bush are still pulling daggers out of their backs.  If anything in this nation isn’t Bush’s fault, it’s our fault for maintaining hostility for  “the cause” (aka surrendering to socialism by accepting a flailing and inexperienced college professor marching into economic failure) with our noisy, waste-of-energy tea-parties.

The truth is, most conservatives love this nation, our freedom of speech, and our due process…we just never took any of it to the extremes the left has since the 60’s.  Now that we’re “mad as hell and aren’t going to take it anymore”, the left is dumbfounded by the mirror we’re holding up.  Why is FOX News hated so much?  Because it finally looks like NBC, CBS, and ABC…but just for the right.  Why are tea parties being dismissed?  Because they are bigger, better, more successful, and more congenial than anything that ever came out of Woodstock, G-20/G-8 summits, or Code Pink.  Why was Joe Wilson picked on?  Because only Pelosi, Frank, Clinton, or Reid have been allowed to boo!  And what is with this big commotion over transparency and actually showing up at town-hall meetings?  Because the left has been involved with slipping things into bills their constituents never agreed to–you know, the way they always accused the right of doing but could magically never prove?

If conservatives seem “bitter”, it’s only because they are finally producing the pills they’ve been forced to swallow for so long by the left.

Obama’s Nobel Prize: Exhibit A
Which leads me to yesterday’s events.  Now, I concede that Obama has done two things RIGHT in his highly screwed up term:  he called Kanye a jack-ass, and he contradicted President Carter’s charge that opposition to him is “race-based”.  Neither of these things has anything to do with foreign policy, domestic policy, or a president’s legacy, but it’s something I can cling to that says he’s capable of common sense.  Oh, the burden I carry knowing yesterday’s event could have been redemptive moment #3. 

After all, he announced he had no idea he had been nominated.  Granted, he’s been caught lying before, but unlike liberals, we conservatives really do want to take a man by his word.  He also stated he had no idea who had nominated him (*cough* Rahm Emanuel).  Then he stated he felt he hadn’t accomplished enough to be deserving of the prize.

*Dog head tilt* Arf??!

Shaking my head to ensure my ears are working and rubbing my eyes to refocus on the TV, I couldn’t believe it!  First he said he was humbled, and then he explained the reasons why he was humbled, and they were accurate reasons?  Up to this point, his winning was nothing more than a further indication that something stinks in the land of Nobel Prize voting.  But now we had an egocentric winner that was actually admitting that the voting stunk.  A moment of integrity: this was a president I could finally get behind!

Then, I saw the List of Nobel Prize Nominees.  Then, I realized he too had been shown the list of nominees prior to his comments yesterday.  This caused a flashback to egomaniac Al Gore and his 2007 win over Irena Sendler for his multi-billion dollar green jobs venture. *Side note: Al Gore’s narcissism is more dangerous than Obama’s because his is based in delusions.  Obama has actually won hearts and minds through the cult of personality.  Gore is just a global-warming legend in his own mind…and now wealthier.  The better to burn up fuel in his mansion and jet planes, my dear.*

Then later, to cement Obama’s win, he announced his plan for the prize money.  Then, I took back my adulation over the moment, and returned to my stewing disappointment.

Obama had a remarkable opportunity yesterday that could have flipped the entire earth in his favor: he could have refused the prize, passing it on to someone ‘worthy’!

If he truly felt undeserving, especially after reading what other nominees had accomplished: human rights, risking lives, etc., he would’ve acted on those feelings accordingly.  Instead, he snatched one more thing he didn’t deserve to display on his shelf of ME-ME-ME, accepted the congratulations from his blind robots, and returned to the oval office so the travelling plans for officially receiving such on honor could be made.

I really want to like my president. I really do. The left feels energized, charged, even vindicated in their hate for the right and their political ideology by things as simple as a Republican president suffering from the flu and passing out in his soup, or attempting to exit after a speech by going to the wrong, locked doors.  The right, on the other hand, just feels exhausted by the daily disappointment in the character of their Democrat presidents.

Related Posts:
Liar, Liar, Pants On Fire!
“If You Don’t Leave, Then You Are NOT For CHANGE!”

This post is taken from an e-mail that has been circulating around the internet since it was revealed that Barak Obama won the Nobel Peace Prize.

I have done some minor editing, without affecting the facts of the story.

********

In May 2008 Irena Sendler died.

During WWII Irena got permission to work in the Warsaw Ghetto, as a plumbing/sewer specialist. She had an ulterior motive.

She knew what the Nazi’s plans for Jews were. She smuggled infants out in the bottom of her tool box and she carried in the back of her truck a burlap sack, for larger kids. She also had a dog in the back of her vehicle that she trained to bark when the Nazi soldiers let her in and out of the ghetto. The soldiers, of course, wanted nothing to do with the dog and the barking covered the any noises the children made.

Over the course of time ( every day being a risk to her life ), she managed to smuggle out and save 2500 children/infants. She was caught, and the Nazi’s broke both her legs, arms and beat her nearly to death.

Irena kept a record of the names of all the kids she smuggled out of the ghetto and kept them in a glass jar, buried under a tree in her back yard. After the war, she tried to locate any parents that may have survived to reunite the family. Most had been gassed. Those with no surviving relatives she helped to place into foster family homes or adoption.

In 2007 Irena was up for the Nobel Peace Prize.

She was not selected. Al Gore won, for a slide show on Global Warming.

In the immortal words of Kurt Vonnegut:

“And so it goes.”

 

Irena Sendler

Check it out: www.irenasendler.org

A Los Angeles Times obituary for Irena described how Irena, a social worker, passed herself off as a nurse to sneak supplies and aid into (and children out of) the Warsaw Ghetto, and the punishment she endured when she was finally caught by the Nazis:  Irena Sendler was reportedly a candidate to receive the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize, but that honor was not awarded to her. (It’s difficult to state categorically that she was “nominated” for the award, since information about Nobel Prize “nominations, investigations, and opinions is kept secret for fifty years.)

In 2007, the Nobel Peace Prize was awarded jointly to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and former U.S. Vice-President Albert Arnold (Al) Gore Jr. “for their efforts to build up and disseminate greater knowledge about man-made climate change, and to lay the foundations for the measures that are needed to counteract such change.” (Al Gore was also involved with another significant award in 2007, when An Inconvenient Truth, a documentary about his campaign to make the issue of global warming a recognized problem worldwide, claimed an Academy Award as “Best Documentary Feature.”)

The International Federation of Social Workers (IFSW) expressed its disappointment that Irena Sendler had not yet been honored with a Nobel Prize:   

She studied at Warsaw University and was a social worker in Warsaw when the German occupation of Poland began in 1939. In 1940, after the Nazis herded Jews into the ghetto and built a wall separating it from the rest of the city, disease, especially typhoid, ran rampant. Social workers were not allowed inside the ghetto, but Sendler, imagining “the horror of life behind the walls,” obtained fake identification and passed herself off as a nurse, allowed to bring in food, clothes and medicine.

By 1942, when the deadly intentions of the Nazis had become clear, Sendler joined a Polish underground organization, Zegota. She recruited 10 close friends — a group that would eventually grow to 25, all but one of them women — and began rescuing Jewish children.

She and her friends smuggled the children out in boxes, suitcases, sacks and coffins, sedating babies to quiet their cries. Some were spirited away through a network of basements and secret passages. Operations were timed to the second. One of Sendler’s children told of waiting by a gate in darkness as a German soldier patrolled nearby. When the soldier passed, the boy counted to 30, then made a mad dash to the middle of the street, where a manhole cover opened and he was taken down into the sewers and eventually to safety.

Most of the children who left with Sendler’s group were taken into Roman Catholic convents, orphanages and homes and given non-Jewish aliases. Sendler recorded their true names on thin rolls of paper in the hope that she could reunite them with their families later. She preserved the precious scraps in jars and buried them in a friend’s garden.

In 1943, she was captured by the Nazis and tortured but refused to tell her captors who her co-conspirators were or where the bottles were buried. She also resisted in other ways. According to Felt, when Sendler worked in the prison laundry, she and her co-workers made holes in the German soldiers’ underwear. When the officers discovered what they had done, they lined up all the women and shot every other one. It was just one of many close calls for Sendler.

During one particularly brutal torture session, her captors broke her feet and legs, and she passed out. When she awoke, a Gestapo officer told her he had accepted a bribe from her comrades in the resistance to help her escape. The officer added her name to a list of executed prisoners. Sendler went into hiding but continued her rescue efforts.

Felt said that Sendler had begun her rescue operation before she joined the organized resistance and helped a number of adults escape, including the man she later married. “We think she saved about 500 people before she joined Zegota,” Felt said, which would mean that Sendler ultimately helped rescue about 3,000 Polish Jews.

When the war ended, Sendler unearthed the jars and began trying to return the children to their families. For the vast majority, there was no family left. Many of the children were adopted by Polish families; others were sent to Israel.

However IFSW is deeply saddened that the life work of Nobel nominee Irena Sendler, social worker, did not receive formal recognition’, said David N. Jones, IFSW President. ‘Irena Sendler and her helpers took personal risks day after day to prevent the destruction of individual lives — the lives of the children of the Warsaw ghetto. This work was done very quietly, without many words and at the risk of their lives. This is so typical of social work, an activity which changes and saves lives but is done out of the glare of publicity and often at personal risk. IFSW recognises her again and at the same time celebrates the commitment and dedication of thousands of social workers around the world who also bring hope and care to people often living on the edge of despair.’

“In our world of big names, curiously, our true heroes tend to be anonymous. In this life of illusion and quasi-illusion, the person of solid virtues who can be admired for something more substantial than his well-knownness often proves to be the unsung hero: the teacher, the nurse, the mother, the honest cop, the hard worker at lonely, underpaid, unglamorous, unpublicized jobs.” 

  –  Daniel J. Boorstin

Some people just make you proud to be a human being, and the incredibly heroic Irena Sendler is in that category.  When asked why she saved 2500-3000 Jewish kids she said simply:  “I was taught that if you see a person drowning, you must jump into the water to save them, whether you can swim or not.”  The acclaim she received late in life bothered her somewhat:  “Every child saved with my help is the justification of my existence on this Earth, and not a title to glory.” 

When any of us confront evil and think, “What can I do?”, may the example of Irena Sendler cause us to do the very most that we can.  Irena Sendler did not think of herself as a heroine.  She said that she could have done much more.  I find that hard to believe, but with such a conscience to guide her I can understand how she accomplished the near miraculous.

There recently was a death of a 98 year-old lady named Irena. During WWII, Irena, got permission to work in the Warsaw Ghetto, as a Plumbing/Sewer specialist. She had an ‘ulterior motive’

She KNEW what the Nazi’s plans were for the Jews, (being German.) Irena smuggled infants out in the bottom of the tool box she carried and she carried in the back of her truck a burlap sack, (for larger kids..)
She also had a dog in the back that she trained to bark when the Nazi soldiers let her in and out of the ghetto. The soldiers of course wanted nothing to do with the dog and the barking covered the kids/infants noises.

During her time of doing this, she managed to smuggle out and save
2500 kids/infants. She was caught, and the Nazi’s broke both her legs, arms and beat her severely.

Irena kept a record of the names of all the kids she smuggled out and kept them in a glass jar, buried under a tree in her back yard. After the war, she tried to locate any parents that may have survived it
and reunited the family. Most had been gassed. Those kids she helped got placed into foster family homes or adopted.

Last year Irena was up for the Nobel Peace Prize. She was
not selected.

Al Gore won, for a slide show on Global Warming.

Mother Ricarda Beauchamp Hambrough, Roman Catholic nun from Brighton who, during Nazi occupation, helped hide 60 Jews in her Casa di San Brigida convent in Rome.

Rose to Abbess, and died in 1966 aged 79. There are petitions to have her made a saint.

Sister Anthony (aka Maria Antoniazzi), from Lancashire and also at the Bridgettine convent.

Died in 1990, but had been made a Righteous Among the Nations by Yad Vashem in Jerusalem.

Monsignor Hugo O’Flaherty who orchestrated the events which Hambrough and Antoniazzi participated in, and others.

Died in 1963, and played by Gregory Peck in 1983 film, The Scarlet and the Black.

Irena Sendler, Polish nurse and social worker who, with the Zegota, hid almost three thousand Jewish children from the occupying Nazis and Polish antisemites.

With Irena Schultz, a German citizen who was aware of the Nazis’ intentions (anyone with photographs?), she secured access to the Warsaw Ghetto with forged identification. Training a dog to bark whenever she entered and left, she carried small children out in a toolbox and larger children in a sack. Eventually caught, and beaten by Nazi guards until both her legs and one arm broke.

Did not reveal the false identities she had arranged for the rescued children, details of which she had hidden in a jar buried in her garden.

Died in 2008, aged 98, after loosing out on the Nobel Peace Prize to someone who was once US Vice-President and lost a Presidential election.

Now played by Anna Paquin in The Courageous Heart of Irena Sendler, an American TVM production. Has posthumously been awarded the 2009 Audrey Hepburn Humanitarian Award.

Does not change the absolute fucking disgrace of the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize.

Miep Gies, co-owner of the Achterhuis in which Anne Frank and her family hid between July 1942 and August 1944.

Still living.

Nicholas Winton, London stockbroker who arranged the Czech kindertransport in August 1939. Seven hundred Jewish children were saved, resulting in five thousand descendents.

Still living.

Unidentified racist filth at Downing Street, August 2009.

Sadly still living.

UPDATE 28/8 – I am noticing a large spike of traffic following Googles for Irena Sendler and related criteria, including over one hundred on Saturday. Wow! Feel free to leave comments.

En el diario La Nación de ayer (domingo 22 de agosto de 2009), en la sección Recordatorios (página 23 de la edición impresa), salió publicado un obituario escrito por Hersh Fuchs. Decía textualmente:

FUCHS, Hersh – 47 años, mi padre; 44 años, mi madre; mis hermanos Abraham, 24 años, Sara, 26 años, Eva, 10 años, y en sus nombres recuerdo a mis familiares, profesores, amigos y vecinos de Lodz, Polonia, vistos por última vez en Auschwitz, en agosto de 1944. En memoria de todos ellos, Jack Fuchs, junto con mi hija Marianne Fuchs.

Dudé si debía transcribir este personal y triste texto en mi blog, pero pensé que si su autor lo había publicitado por un medio tan masivo, no tendría inconvenientes en que lo publicara en este espacio leído apenas por un par de personas. Así que heme aquí, no sólo transcribiendo el obituario, sino a punto de compartir con ustedes la profunda congoja que me provocó leerlo. Apenas puedo llegar a imaginar qué se siente perder a tu familia completa, y menos aún, perderla en circunstancias tan infrahumanas. Entonces recordé por qué odio profundamente a los totalitarismos: aniquilan vidas, destruyen historias y toman sueños que no les corresponde tomar. Los totalitarismos (o autoritarismos en su versión “menos mala”), entronan a un hombre que, endiosado, cree tener el poder de decidir sobre la vida y la muerte de las personas. Y no me refiero sólo a la muerte física. No dudo que el Sr. Fuchs, de alguna manera, también murió en Auschwitz, porque un Sr. llamado Adolf Hitler creyó tener el derecho de tomar la vida de sus padres, sus hermanos, sus profesores, amigos y vecinos. En suma, creyó tener el derecho de tomar todo lo que a un hombre lo hace vivir y ser feliz.

Irena Sendler

Afortunadamente, y porque la libertad no conoce de armas, dictadores o torturas que la dobleguen, existieron personas como Sophia Scholl, Gisella Pearl, Maximiliano Kolbe o Irena Sendler, que pudieron construir en medio de la destrucción de la Segunda Guerra Mundial. O existen mujeres como Yoani Sánchez, que claman por su Cuba libre arriesgando todos los días su vida y la de los suyos. Pero ellos y sus historias, claro, quedan aplastadas por los libros que no las cuentan, por las estadísticas en las que no entran o por el olvido, que según dice la famosa frase, después de la muerte es el segundo verdugo del hombre.

Este post, de manera humilde, pretende rendir homenaje y mantener vivas esas historias. La de Fuchs, la de Scholl, la de Pearl, la de Kolbe, la de Sendler, la de Sánchez, y la de tantos hombres y mujeres que, desde el anonimato pero con la convicción de que todos somos libres e iguales en dignidad y derechos, se atrevieron a decirle que no a un hombre que se creyó Dios.

Hace algunos días, familiares y amigos recibieron un mail mío con una presentación adjunta. En ese mail, escribí:

Siempre me pregunté si hubiera tenido el valor suficiente para enfrentarme a las brutales dictaduras del siglo XX o a los genocidios que nos asemejaron más a bestias que a hombres. También me pregunto si hubiera tenido el valor para ocultar a un perseguido en mi casa –aún sabiendo que mi vida corría peligro–, o si hubiera defendido mi fe y mis convicciones en tiempos en los que pensar distinto es un crimen. Siempre me lo pregunté, pero probablemente no pueda responderlo. Por eso, y porque tal vez no hubiera tenido el suficiente coraje para hacer nada de lo que anteriormente referí, quiero compartir con ustedes la vida de una heroína desconocida: Irena Sendler. Irena es de esas tantas mujeres que permanecen olvidadas en la intrahistoria, pero que han sido fieles a esa inmortalizada frase del Talmud que reza: Quién salva una vida, salva al mundo entero.

Creo que llegan momentos en la historia en los que no se debaten ni teorías ni creencias, sino vidas. Y cuando eso sucede, los que optan por salvarlas poniendo en riesgo la propia, son héroes. Por eso Irena, por su gran y admirable humanidad, merece que conozcan su historia”.

Reafirmo cada palabra de mi mail, y salvando las distancias de brutalidad y muerte, recuerdo al pueblo venezolano y el difícil momento que le toca vivir. Seguramente también allí trabajan en silencio y abrazando la libertad, hombres y mujeres que creen que ninguno merece reverencias; que ninguno es el dueño del poder; y que ninguno puede arrogarse el derecho a silenciar creencias y pensamientos diferentes.

*

No comparto lo que dices,
pero defenderé hasta la muerte tu derecho a decirlo

Frase apócrifa de Voltaire

]]> http://blog4546961.wordpress.com/2009/08/17/sendler/ Mon, 17 Aug 2009 15:10:11 +0000 tellinghistory http://blog4546961.wordpress.com/2009/08/17/sendler/

There recently was a death of a 98 year-old lady named Irena. During WWII, Irena, got permission to work in the Warsaw Ghetto, as a Plumbing/Sewer specialist. She had an ‘ulterior motive’ … She KNEW what the Nazi’s plans were for the Jews, (being German.) Irena smuggled infants out in the bottom of the tool box she carried and she carried in the back of her truck a burlap sack, (for larger kids..) She also had a dog in the back that she trained to bark when the Nazi soldiers let her in and out of the ghetto. The soldiers of course wanted nothing to do with the dog and the barking covered the kids/infants noises.. During her time of doing this, she managed to smuggle out and save 2500 kids/infants. She was caught, and the Nazi’s broke both her legs, arms and beat her severely. Irena kept a record of the names of all the kids she smuggled out and kept them in a glass jar, buried under a tree in her back yard. After the war, she tried to locate any parents that may have survived it and reunited the family. Most had been gassed. Those kids she helped got placed into foster family homes or adopted.

Learn more about her story at The Irena Sendler Project

Contributed by: Je’Amour

This is Irena Sendler she recently died at the age of 98, she was a Nobel Peace prize Nominee. Please remember her story and make sure that it makes it into the history books and into your herstory book. This is another example of why women need to rise up and be heard from all over the world. We simply do not count- our worth is not measured as significant enough.  Read on and judge for yourself Let’s  thank Je’Amour for bringing us this story ~ BettyJean

During WWII, Irena was given permission to work in the Warsaw Ghetto, as a plumbing/sewer specialist.  She had an ulterior motive. Being German, Irena knew what the Nazi plan was for Jews.  Irena smuggled out infants in the bottom of a tool box she carried in the back of her truck.  She used a burlap sack for bigger children.

She also had a dog in the back that she trained to bark when Nazi soldiers let her in and out of the ghetto.  The soldiers wanted nothing to do with her dog..  The barking covered noises of the infants and children.

Irena managed to smuggle out and save 2500 infants and children, before she was caught!  The Nazi’s broke both her legs and arms, and beat her severely.  Irena kept a record in a jar buried under a tree in her back yard of all the children she smuggled out.  

After the war, she tried to locate all parents that may have survived to reunite families, but most had been gassed. The children she could not reunite were placed with foster families or adopted.

I have no idea what took them so long but finally in 2008 Irena was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize.  She lost to Al Gore who won for a slide show on Global Warming.

There have been many questionable Nobel Peace Prize Laureates, but one which really sticks in my throat is the 2007 Laureate, Al Gore. One of the inconvenient truths about this is that a failed nominee that year was Irena Sendler, the last surviving member of the Zegota: part of the Polish underground in WWII which successfully sheltered thousands of Jewish children and others from the Nazis.

At 97 years of age, this was surely to be the last chance to publically acknowledge a woman who insisted “we are not heroes. I continue to have qualms of conscience that I did so little”. She remained largely unknown until her death the next year, and the prize went to Al Gore.

What directed my mind down this path was reading of the actions of two English nuns in Nazi-occupied Rome, and their roles in the sheltering of many dozens of Jews in their convent. There is a bid to canonize one, Mother Ricarda Beauchamp Hambrough (also discussed at Roman Catholic Vocations). Her countrywoman, Sister Anthony (née Maria Antoniazzi), who has been made one of the 14 British Righteous Among the Nations by the Yad Vashem in Jerusalem; just as Sendler was.

In the rambling stream of consciousness which is my mind, this took me back to a missive in which I discussed Cllr. Salim Mulla of Blackburn and Darwen who has been linked to Jew-baiting e-mails sent by a number of, now dismissed or reprimanded Lancashire County Council employees.

Because Sister Anthony was from Lancashire.

[To be continued...]

In May 2008, a 98 year-old Polish lady named Irena Sendler died.

During WWII, she got permission to work in the Warsaw Ghetto, as a Plumbing/Sewer specialist but she had an ulterior motive. She KNEW of the Nazi’s plans for the Jews. Irena smuggled infants out in the bottom of the tool box she carried and, in the back of her truck, she had a burlap sack for the larger children. She had a dog in the back of the truck that she trained to bark when the Nazi soldiers let her in and out of the ghetto. The soldiers wanted nothing to do with the dog and the barking covered the noise of the children. She managed to smuggle out and save 2,500 children before she was caught; the Nazis broke both her legs and her arms and beat her severely.

Irena kept a record of the names of all the children that she smuggled out which she kept in a glass jar buried under a tree in her back yard. After the War, she tried to locate any parents that had survived and reunited the families. Most, of course, had been gassed, but she helped those children to be placed into foster family homes or adopted.
In 2007, Irena was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize but was not selected. Al Gore won.

The courageous heart of Irena Sendler Hallmark Hall of Fame 2009 TV movie

And this clip

 

 
During WWII, Irena was given permission to work in the Warsaw Ghetto, as a plumbing/sewer specialist.  She had an ulterior motive.  
 Being German, Irena knew what the Nazi plan was for Jews.  
 Irena smuggled out infants in the bottom of a tool box she carried in the back of her truck.  She used a burlap sack for bigger children.  
 She also had a dog in the back that she trained to bark when Nazi soldiers let her in and out of the ghetto.  The soldiers wanted nothing to do with her dog.  The barking covered noises of the infants and children.
 Irena managed to smuggle out and save 2500 infants and children, before she was caught!  The Nazi’s broke both her legs and arms, and beat her severely.  
 Irena kept a record in a jar buried under a tree in her back yard of all the children she smuggled out.  
 After the war, she tried to locate all parents that may have survived to reunite families, but most had been gassed.  
 The children she could not reunite were placed with foster families or adopted.  
 Irena was nominated for the 2008 Nobel Peace Prize.  She was not selected.  Al Gore won for a slide show on Global Warming.   
 Help remember this ‘noble’ lady for her bravery. visit here

I wish I had time to blog about all five of these. I welcome comments about which you would like to see!

1. Time Magazine’s article “Decoding God’s Changing Moods” (June 15 issue).

I’m pretty sure that the author, Robert Wright, is only using the word God to represent what he considers to be human creations. (His book is called The Evolution of God…) And I’m sure he intends his essay to promote peace. But that’s really the only nice thing I can say. His demeaning tone to all who believe in religion, and especially his disdain for the God of the Bible and praise for pragmatic polytheisism, is grating. And his prescription for a tolerance-based peace may seem hopeful to some, but it has never worked before. But the God he discounts will bring true peace, based on truth, love and overwhelming power…

2. Irena Sendler.

My most popular post was about her, the day after the Hallmark movie about this Polish nurse who saved thousands of Jewish children. I’ve actually been working on an article about her for a couple years now. Just wish I could find time to finish it!

3. Stories of wonderful people and organizations helping others! I’ve been keeping a folder on the ones I haven’t run yet.

4. Beauty and the Beast: Lessons of Give vs. Get.

I saw a wonderful production of the Disney musical by the Milford High School drama department, and have been wanting to write about it.

5. Us and Them. David Berreby’s book has intriguing studies and research on why we form cliques and enemies.

Let me know what you think…

Every so often, I come across a remarkable story of indefinable proportions, that has me questioning just how useless I am personally, and how tangled I am in my own life, in my own selfish need for the next commodity to hit the shelves, that I forget just how incredible stories of courage and human kindness actually are.

We as a rule, tend to publically canonise those who have achieved nothing spectacular or worthy of the level of praise and admiration they seem to command. They haven’t enriched our lives. They simply offer something to read about, gossip about, and quite ridiculously, look up to.

Celebrities become commodities for the public to chew up and spit out one year, and idolise the next, depending on the sort of attention the Great British Media chose to lavish onto them. A few months ago, it was Jade Goody. To me, the Princess Diana-esque way her death was handled, even before she died, stretches to the very essence of consumerism and the negativity it embodies at it’s most fundamental level. Those worthy of praise and admiration largely go unnoticed and unpublicised, the noise of their names goes unheard, drowned out by the noise of the split between Peter and Jordan, or who Charlotte Church was seen with this week.

We tend to overuse the word “hero”. We celebrate footballers as heroes, actors as heroes, musicians as heroes, and so we ultimately forget as generation after generation passes down their own interpretation of “hero”, what the word actually means.

During an era of unimaginable horror and destruction, in which the lives of six million were exterminated, including 1.5 million children, there exists enduring stories that no matter how unknown they are today, will pass through time as stories of ultimate courage, sacrifice, compassion and indefinable love.

Yesterday, marked a year since the death of the remarkable Irena Sendler, a social worker from Warsaw. Irena was born in 1910, and lived in Warsaw, Poland when the Nazis invaded in 1939. Irena worked was in charged of so-called “Canteens” set up to help the homeless and orphaned children, to provide food and shelter, clothing and medicine.

The Nazis set up the Warsaw Ghetto, cramped 50,000+ Jews together in horribly confined spaces without enough food or shelter to go around. Irena set up a false name, and was allowed access to the Ghetto, claiming she was a nurse, in control of epidemic handling. Whilst there, she secretly smuggled in food, medicine, money, clothes, and other necessities. She however, could not prevent over 2000 people a month dying from disease and starvation. She then found out that the children would soon be on their way to Treblinka death camp, and so she decided that enough was enough.

Irena set about smuggling children out of the Ghettos. She tasked herself with persuading Jewish mothers to part with their children, which she later said was the most difficult thing she’s ever had to do, noting “In my dreams ,I still hear the cries when they left their parents” and then to persuade Polish families on the outside, to look after the children, on fear of being caught and executed by the Nazis. She dedicated her war days to this task. She issued children with false documents, in order to smuggle them out in an Ambulance. Some were even take out in body bags, some in suit cases, some in sacks of potatoes and other foods, as Irena convinced the Nazi guards that they had died. She arranged for all 2,500 children that she had saved, to be issued with false identities as Christians, and re-homed. She kept the true identities of the children, written in code, on a piece of paper, buried in a jar in her neighbour’s back yard in the hope that the Nazis would be defeated one day, and that she could locate all the children and let them know of their true identities.

In 1943, the Nazis discovered what she had been doing. They arrested her and tortured her, in order to get the names of all the children who had escaped, and all the families who were protecting them. They broke her legs, and her feet, and they crippled her for life. She refused to give up any names. They then sentenced her to death. Luckily, her friends who had helped her in Warsaw, bribed a Gestapo member, and Irena escaped, at the very last minute before execution.

After the war, she set about meeting all the 2,500 children she had rescued and spending decades trying to find records of any remaining family members they may have, in order to reunite them with their children, brothers, sisters, nieces and nephews who had survived the holocaust.

Irena Sendler, who died on May 12th 2008, is quite possibly one of the most couragous and brilliant women of the twentieth century, she not only saved 2,500 children from almost certain horrific deaths, she is responsible for the generations of offspring those 2,500 have produced. The grandchildren and great grandchildren of those 2,500 children are now walking the streets, playing in the fields, and becoming the teachers, the scientists, the doctors of tomorrow. Irena Sendler gave them that opportunity, when otherwise, all would have been lost before the 1950s. She never claimed any sort of recognition, and lived a humble existence in a small place, throughout the rest of her life. A remarkable woman, who led a life suited to true heroes and heroines of history. Despite her name being relatively unknown, her legacy, her courage, and her incredible compassion for 2,500 people and the families they created, is far superior to any amount of press. Perhaps in a World where selfishness is encouraged, a woman who acted in the most selfless way imaginable, and claimed no publicity or admiration, has the power to turn more heads, and influence more people to act in the interests of others, than if it were an every day occurrence. Nevertheless, the story of Irena Sendler, when I first read about her in 2008, months before she died, certainly impacted on my view of the World, of the power of compassion, and of humanity, and that can only be a good thing.

“Every child saved with my help is the justification of my existence on this Earth, and not a title to glory”.
- Irena Sendler

February 15, 1910 - May 12, 2008



If I could choose, if it was possible, if I was worthy, if babies homes weren’t crowded 
if aunts and grandparents weren’t overburdened and I could take it all back 
to the point where no man had sinned, I would rather be an angel than a saint.
 
I would rather float close to God and close to men than be canonized by men. 
I’m dying and I see a light, I’m dying and I see my creator, I’m dying 
and the heat which fills my veins finally calls my lifelong bluffing
 
and I leave. Life’s been so long in coming and so quick in going ...

-
Excerpt from "Angel Saint" by Lilah Hegnauer
Image from The Irena Sendler Project

homenajes irena sendler

Good Morning……Trying to get 1000 people to join my following on twitter.. I figure that is a good amount, I am not a star who is going for a million record… I have 17 that’s 17 more than I had three days ago… and most of mine are authors… or family…. www.twitter.com/readerwave   I am trying to show off my store.I got an order last night… and a customer looking for a book….WE are looking for “Mother of Children of the Holocaust, The story of Irena Sendler by Anna Miezkowska, in English I have found in German and Polish.

you can find new and used books at both my on line book stores

www.readerwave.com  www.ebay.com/readerwave   www.readerwave.ecrater.com   www.shotglassheaven.ecrater.com questions contact me here or at  readerwave@bellsouth.net