On October 20, , "Jolanta" was caught and locked into Pawiak prison in Warsaw. Although the Nazis tortured her—to the extent that she needed crutches and a wheelchair the rest of her life—she refused to divulge either the names of her collaborators or those of the individuals who had been rescued. Luckily, just before her execution by firing squad, the Zegota underground managed to bribe a guard.
But most parents and relatives had either been killed at Treblinka, or otherwise disappeared. When Poland was occupied by the Soviets after the war, Irena Sendler was persecuted by the anti-Semitic communist Polish state, branded a Fascist for her WWII underground activities , and was accused of supporting the government-in-exile and its Polish "home army.
Still, she was not forgotten everywhere. Then, in , the now year-old Irena Sendler was honoured by Poland's Senate. Unable to leave her nursing home, she responded with a statement delivered by Elzbieta Ficowska, who had been one of the infants she saved during WWII.
And it was perhaps this irony that made Polish President Lech Kaczynski break the Nobel secrecy code, stating that Sendler "can justly be nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize. Why did she not win the Prize? That may not be truly understood for another 47 years Nobel's year nomination secrecy.
But one reason cited by various sources is the Nobel Prize criterium, which states that a nominee be involved in "significant activities during the past two years. Yet she did get one more medal in She was the oldest recipient, ever, of the international Order of the Smile for exceptional love, care, and aid to children. If she could not have a Nobel Prize, that honour does seem most appropriate. Skip to main content. 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.
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 Sendler was without doubt a very courageous woman who repeatedly risked her own life to save hundreds of Jewish children from the Warsaw ghetto during the German occupation of Poland in World War 2 - and there is certainly nothing wrong with commemorating her heroism.
However, what should immediately be obvious about this particular "tribute" is that it contains a lot of information about Sendler that is completely wrong.
It also turns into an agenda-driven attack on Al Gore and Barack Obama, as well as questioning the credibility of the Nobel Peace Prize early versions of the chain letter only mentioned Gore, but Obama was thrown into the mix after he became US President. First of all, you'd think that somebody who was genuinely interested in commemorating Irena Sendler might actually take the trouble to find out some basic facts about her which can very easily be found online , instead of making up a load of complete garbage.
As well as not being German, she was also very definitely not a plumber or "sewer specialist" whatever that is. She obtained a special permit to enter the Warsaw ghetto to check for signs of typhus, and it was while conducting inspections of the sanitary conditions in the ghetto that she was able to smuggle out babies and children. Sendler used many different ways to remove children from the ghetto - the most common was probably by taking them through an old courthouse and church, which had doors opening both into and out of the ghetto.
Others were led out through the sewers. Sometimes a child was strapped underneath the stretcher of a patient being placed in an outgoing ambulance. The youngest and smallest children were put in coffins, suitcases or boxes….
Sendler had initially concentrated on saving orphans, but as it became more and more obvious that the Germans intended to kill everyone in the ghetto, she saved whoever she could.
It's true that information about the children's original and new identities was buried in jars, in the hope that they could eventually be reunited with their families - and it's also true that in , Sendler was arrested by the Gestapo and severely tortured in the notorious Pawiak prison her legs were fractured, but not her arms as stated in the chain letter.
She was listed on public bulletin boards as among those who had been killed that day and went into hiding, but continued her work for the Jewish children.
However, they soon discovered that almost all of the children's family members had been killed at Treblinka, or had otherwise gone missing.
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