Working with the Polish Resistance

In the fall of 1939, when Germany invaded Poland, Sendler was a
29-year-old senior administrator in the Warsaw Social Welfare
Department, which distributed meals and gave financial assistance and
other services to the poor, elderly, and orphans. The Nazis had herded
more than 450,000 Jews into a 16-block area and built a wall separating
it from the rest of Warsaw. Sendler helped acquire forged documents,
registering many Jews under Christian names so they could receive the
city’s services.

In 1942, she joined a Polish underground organization called Zegota.
She smuggled food, medicine, and clothing into the Warsaw Ghetto but
decided she needed to do more. Under the name Jolanta, she recruited 24
others and begged Jewish parents to give up their children so that they
might be saved. Her group smuggled the children out in boxes,
suitcases, sacks, and coffins, sedating babies to quiet their cries and
having older children pretend to be ill so they could be taken out in
ambulances. Some were spirited away through a network of basements and
secret passages.

Outside the ghetto walls, the children were
given false names and documents and then adopted into the homes of
Polish families or hidden in convents or orphanages. Sendler made lists
of the children’s real names, put the lists in jars, then buried the
jars in a garden so that someday she could dig them up and find the
children to tell them of their real identities.

Then, on
October 20, 1943, the Gestapo caught up with her. She was arrested,
imprisoned in Warsaw’s notorious Pawiak prison, and tortured. Her feet
and legs were broken; for the rest of her life, she needed crutches and
a wheelchair. But she refused to betray any of her co-conspirators or
to reveal the whereabouts of any of the children. She was sentenced to
death by firing squad, but unbeknownst to her, Zegota had bribed one of
the German guards, who helped her escape at the last moment. She spent
the rest of the war in hiding, much like the children she had saved.

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