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Tropical Tale
No. 5 - Vol. 4
MOTHER’S
DAY IN MEMORIAM
 HONORING
IRENA
SENDLER
A
Beacon of Light in Darkness
It
is befitting that this Mother’s Day I honor
Irena Sendler for her sacrifice in
Poland
during World War II.
She unselfishly saved some 2,500 Jewish
children during the Nazi Holocaust by sneaking
them out of the Warsaw Ghetto.
Her family in
Poland
said she died at the age of 98.
In
1965, Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial in
Jerusalem
honored a “righteous Gentile” for her
heroics, but at the time, the Communist leaders
would not let her out of the country to receive
her award.
She was finally able to travel out of
Poland
and collect it in 1983.
She
was a woman with a kind heart who smuggled
babies out of the ghetto in baskets and placed
them in convents, orphanages and family homes.
Hoping to reunite the children with their own
families after the war, she wrote their names on
slips of paper and put them into a jar which she
buried under an apple tree. The Nazis never
found the jar.
Even
when the Gestapo arrested and tortured her she
refused to reveal the names of the other people
involved in her team of angels. Her father, a
physician, had taught her that “people can
only be divided into good and bad people; their
religion, race and nationality does not
matter.”
President
Lech Kaczynski expressed his “great regret”
over the death of such an “exceptional
person.”
“Every
child saved with my help and the help of all the
wonderful secret messengers, who today are no
longer living, is the justification of my
existence on this earth, and not a title to
glory,” she wrote in a letter to the Polish
Senate. “I
kept silent.
I preferred to die than to reveal our
activity,” she told Anna Mieszkowska who wrote
her biography:
Mother of the Children of the Holocaust:
The Story of Irena Sendler.”
It
was not until some children from
Uniontown
,
Kansas
, wrote a short play:
“Life in a Jar,” that she came to be
known internationally, when the play was
performed in
USA
,
Canada
and
Poland
.
And
so, this week, I honor all mothers, especially
mine, and Irena Sendler, who must have a special
place in heaven!
Alinka Zyrmont
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