The Woman Who Refused to Let Children Disappear
Irena Sendler risked her life to rescue Jewish children. But she also fought to make sure that, if they survived, they would not lose their names, families, or histories. Warsaw, 1940. A wall was going up. Nazi Germany had ordered Warsaw's Jewish population into a sealed ghetto. By its peak, more than 400,000 Jewish people were confined in an area of roughly 1.3 square miles. Overcrowding, starvation and disease became deadly. Between 1940 and mid-1942 alone, approximately 83,000 Jews died from starvation and disease. Inside that world, survival was becoming a daily struggle. Outside the ghetto was a Polish social worker named Irena Sendler . She could have looked away. She didn't. A social worker enters the ghetto When the war began, Sendler worked for the Welfare Department of the Warsaw municipality. After the ghetto was sealed in November 1940, she obtained a municipal permit allowing her to enter under the pretext of inspecting sanitary conditions. She used thos...