Life in a jar

There are only two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is a miracle. —Albert Einstein

Amid the gut-wrenching cable TV reports on the massive earthquake in rural western China and valiant efforts of the Chinese government to save lives (which even the Western media has noted are far more efficient and faster than the US government’s inept response to their Katrina hurricane disaster or to the Myanmar government’s chaotic response to their recent cyclone disaster), I remember the recent passing of a quiet, 98-year-old Polish lady who risked her own life to defy evil and courageously saved 2,500 Jewish children from the Nazi Holocaust.

She wasn’t a lady politician like Gloria M. Arroyo or Hillary Clinton, she wasn’t a tycoon like Martha Stewart, she wasn’t a showbiz celebrity like Paris Hilton, but she led a life of great, unqualified success. She personified integrity and moral courage. One of the most inspiring heroines of our times — Polish Catholic social worker Irena Sendler — quietly passed away last May 12 at the age of 98. Her death came just two days away from the 60th-anniversary celebration of the re-establishment of the Jewish state of Israel.

Hers was a remarkable saga of having saved 2,500 Jewish kids from the Warsaw Ghetto and certain death, and refusing to betray them even during torture by the Nazis, but for 60 years, much of the world and even her own Poland knew nothing about her heroism. Then, in 1999, high school students Elizabeth Cambers, Megan Stewart, Sabrina Coons and Janice Underwood of Kansas, USA, under their teacher Norman Conard, researched and created a short play about her life for their history class project.

The nobility of the human spirit and of godliness often shine defiantly and most brilliantly in the darkest periods of history. 

In October 1940, a month after invading Poland, German Nazis forced 450,000 Jews — about 30 percent of Warsaw’s total population — into a crammed ghetto surrounded by newly built seven-foot-high walls. Everyone knew the Nazis planned to massacre them. Then 29-year-old Catholic social worker Sendler volunteered to join the Zegota underground resistance group, which intended to save the Jews. She said: “I was taught that if a man is drowning, it is irrelevant what his religion or nationality is, one must help him. It is a need of the heart.”

For 18 months, Sendler and her team were resourceful at a time when the Nazis were sending Jews to the gas chambers. There were Jewish mothers who refused to separate from their kids, but others who were convinced by Sendler to let them save their kids. She and her accomplices smuggled out Jewish kids through sewer pipes, by hiding them in coffins, luggage and even potato sacks on the backseats of trolleys. She even sedated or taped the mouths of some crying babies, sneaking them out inside carpenter’s boxes or medical bags. A dog in their ambulance was specially trained to bark noisily to hide the cries of the Jewish babies.

Saving the Jewish kids was not enough for Sendler, however. She didn’t want them to lose and forget their ethnic and cultural heritage as Jews. Even if keeping records of her illegal activities was dangerous, she recorded the children’s true identities in two sets of paper strips and placed them in two jars, which she then buried under an apple tree of a friend’s garden. The Jewish kids were hidden and cared for by non-Jewish families and given new non-Jewish identities.

When one of Sendler’s messengers was caught and tortured by the Nazis to reveal their secret operation, she was arrested on October 20, 1943. The Nazis tortured her to get the names and whereabouts of the 2,500 Jewish kids; they even broke both her legs and her feet, but she stoically refused to give them the lists in the two jars. When the Nazis were about to execute her, the Zegota bribed a guard to allow her to escape with a rucksack of money. She was knocked unconscious and abandoned on the road, and she has since needed to use crutches due to her torture injuries.

After the Nazis were defeated and World War II ended, Irena Sendler went to her friend’s garden to dig up the two jars under the apple tree. She wanted to reunite the kids with their real parents, but unfortunately only a few of the parents survived. 

When the Communists took over Poland, anti-Semitism and the suppression of history kept Sendler’s heroism out of the limelight. She was already 94 years old, sickly and at a nursing home in Poland when the four Kansas students read her story as an unheralded heroine in a magazine their teacher gave them. They were pleasantly surprised that she was still alive.

The students visited her, interviewed and wrote her many times to create their play entitled Life in a Jar honoring her. The story of this courageous and righteous woman became well known. There are plans to film her life story, reportedly starring the superstar Angelina Jolie.

The high school students’ play on Irena Sendler has since been performed over 240 times to standing-room-only audiences in the US, Canada and Europe, to people who often weep after watching her story. The former social studies teacher Norm Conard always taught his students at Uniontown High School a Hebrew expression, “Tikkun olan,” which means “to repair the world.”

In 2003, Pope John Paul II wrote her a personal letter praising her moral courage in saving so many lives. In 2003, long after the fall of the pro-Soviet Communists, the Polish government gave her the nation’s highest honor, the White Eagle Order. Last year, on March 14, the Senate of Poland honored her and Polish President Lech Kaczynski stated that she “can be justly named for the Nobel Peace Prize.” She was nominated but the prize went to former US Vice President Al Gore and the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

In a letter of gratitude to the Polish parliament for honoring her as a national hero last year, Sendler wrote: “Every child saved with my help is the justification of my existence on this Earth, and not a title to glory.”

It is good and gutsy persons like Irena Sendler who endlessly reaffirm my faith in the basic decency and remarkable nobility of the human spirit; who strengthen my belief that a truly good name, honor, idealism and selfless service for the benefit of others are far more to be prized than just material wealth, power or celebrity. We should count our blessings. Every day is a miracle. Help others. Never compromise about lies and evil. Never lose hope. Cherish and make the most of our priceless, wonderful lives!

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