Life in a Jar: The Irena Sendler Project

by Jack Mayer

if she was self-sufficient and invisible, she would be invulnerable.

The spirits of the dead were in the wind, in rushing water, in sunset and moonrise, in the smell of the earth.

nothing written or explained logically could ever capture what Warsaw endured in September 1939.

“There are two kinds of people in this world, good and bad. It doesn’t matter if they are rich or poor, what religion or race. What matters is if they are good or bad.”

“Always remember, my darling Irena. If you see someone drowning, you must rescue him, even if you cannot swim.”

the 9th day of the month of Av,

Karski had been smuggled into Poland by the government-in-exile to gather evidence of the mass murder of Jews – he thought the number could be in the millions – to be an eye witness, to bring his account to Roosevelt and Churchill. Allied bombing of the rail lines leading to the camps could save hundreds of thousands.

the ZOB – Zydowska Organizacja Bojowa.

ZEGOTA.

All will perish. Poor and rich, old and young, women, men, youngsters, infants… Their only guilt is that they were born into the Jewish nation condemned to extermination by Hitler. England is silent, so is America, even the influential international Jewry, so sensitive in its reaction to any transgression against its people, is silent. Poland is silent. Dying Jews are surrounded by a host of Pilates washing their hands in innocence.

Whoever remains silent in the face of murder becomes an accomplice of the murder. He who does not condemn, condones. We are required by God to protest. God who forbids us to kill. We are required by our Christian consciousness.

Every human being has the right to be loved by his fellow men. The blood of the defenseless cries to heaven for revenge. Those who ...

Zofia Kossak

It is the great sorrow of our time that one cannot be humane without risking one’s life.”

zegot meaning ‘to burn.’ I suppose we are the keepers of a flame of sorts.”

“January Uprising,”

letter “P” superimposed on a “W,” standing for Polska Walczy – Poland is Fighting.

dead stars whose light we see long after they’re gone.”

“Yes, I was afraid, but my anger was stronger than my fear.” Her more enigmatic answer, closer to the truth was, “It was a need of my heart.”

“Protestant girls from rural Kansas, rescuing the story of a Catholic social worker from Poland who rescued Jewish children from the Nazis. It gives me hope.”

protecting children – I mean, isn’t that a need of everyone’s heart?”

The dirty secret that every Pole knows is that the Russians betrayed the Polish freedom fighters. The Red Army waited across the Vistula while the Germans killed more than 200,000 men, women, and children and leveled Warsaw. Then Stalin re-wrote history, celebrating the saving of Poland by the Red Army and the Soviet Union. Polish partisans, our heroes, suddenly became outlaws. Ten years ago I would have gone to prison for saying this to you.

One thing was certain – in the flow of history no one knew the future; one had to carry the torch when it was handed to you.

Incredibly, there is no complete written Polish history of the Warsaw ghetto. Think about what this means. How could something so important in a nation’s history be ignored? It is not forgotten. Every Pole knows. It is ignored.”

“It always blows me away how grass cracks concrete.”

In the four years of the war I learned that if fear was a kind of starvation, then anger was bread and water, life-sustaining, if not nourishing.

Irena had it right – there were no guarantees and maybe everybody’s world falls apart in one way or another, some more spectacularly than others.

It’s the way we make sense

of the world. It’s what history is.”

We feel everything, but understand little.”

the remarkable story of Jan Karski, a representative of the Polish government-in-exile – a spy sent to Poland in August of 1942, during the liquidation of the ghetto, to bring eyewitness evidence of the Holocaust to Allied leaders. Since Irena knew the ghetto so well, the underground had asked her to give Karski a tour, after which he was taken to a partisan unit in the forests near Lwow. They disguised him in a Ukrainian uniform so he could witness firsthand the murders at transit stations en route to the Belzec extermination camp. He then returned to Warsaw where a dentist removed several of his teeth so the resultant swelling would disguise his Polish-accented German. He escaped from Poland to Berlin, then through Vichy France to Marseilles where the French underground smuggled him across the Pyrenees into Spain. Karski carried evidence – a key whose hollow shaft contained microfilm of hundreds of documents. Several weeks later he was in London telling his story, begging the Allies to at least bomb the rail lines to the camps. Newspapers declined to print his accounts; no one could believe his allegations. Neither did Churchill nor Roosevelt.

What I did was not extraordinary. It was a normal thing to do. I was just being decent.

Every time you walk into church, the first thing you see is a man on a cross. He died to save us – not to give us everything we want – to save us. That’s what’s so hard to understand. It’s not about Him answering your prayers – it’s about you being like Him no matter what happens on this Earth. ‘Thy will be done.’ There will always be sadness and pain.”

“You know,” the rabbi said to them. “This moment is the ultimate revenge on Hitler. Protestant kids, celebrating a Catholic rescuer of Jewish children from the Warsaw ghetto, performing in a Jewish theater in Warsaw. And they are being filmed by German television.”

Tikkun Olam -- repairing the world