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The Nazis were the most inhumane regime the world had ever seen.
During those dark days because of their unparalleled brutality, common people were driven to feats they never expected they were capable of. It came down truly to, good versus evil.
So many of these undocumented acts of humanity are lost to time and circumstances, but a few of these unsung heroic stories survived and are memorialized at a unique museum in Ft. Scott, KS, the Lowell Milken Center for Unsung Heroes.
The genesis for the museum is one of those World War II stories that thankfully didn’t succumb to time.
It all started with a seventh grade assignment to study an aspect of World War II in Norman Conard’s history class. Megan Stewart, Elizabeth Chambers and Sabrina Coons in researching the War, the girls latched onto a story about the Warsaw Ghetto.
Warsaw, Poland, had the largest population of Jews in Europe. In September of 1939 after swiftly conquering Poland and employing perverse Nazi policies against all Jews, the Germans started rounding up people and families, forcing 400,000 Jews into a 1.3 square mile area of the city now called the Ghetto. That meant three to five families lived in a single apartment. Space was precious but so was food and water. Disease, starvation and death systematically took hold; thousands began to die daily.
A young Polish girl saw this crime against humanity happening and had to act. Her name was Irena Sendler. She created false papers and made herself into an infectious disease nurse, which gave her access to the Ghetto. In the months and years to come, there was such desperation inside the walls, families would do the unthinkable. Death was closing in; parents would make the incredible choice and give up their babies to Irena. She would then smuggle them out in a potato sack, under her cloak or in her tool box to save their lives.
Once out, Irena’s job was far from over. She would provide these children with new non-Jewish identities and find them sanctuary in convents, orphanages or friendly Christian homes.
As Irena continued to be successful, she recruited others to help. These unsung heroes also risked their lives. To illustrate the extreme, it was a Nazi-prosecuted penalty of death should you be caught giving food to a Jew.
There was a church that had two doors—one opened to the Ghetto and the other to the Christian side. It was said, with Irena’s help, you could enter through one door a Jew, obtain forged papers and exit a Catholic.
Irena continued on. It is estimated she and her team delivered 2,500 babies and children out of the Ghetto escaping certain death. Just think of the heartache of giving up your child. You knew you would never see them again because now in later years, entire families were being sent en masse to “camps.”
After years of success, Irena was caught. The gestapo figured out what she had accomplished and sent her to the infamous Pawiak Prison where she was tortured. Breaking both her legs and feet, Irena still would not give up her associates names nor the names of the children they helped. She was set to be executed. The day before her scheduled execution, she escaped after a well-placed bribe was accepted.
Irena survived and lived out the rest of the war in hiding.
To learn more about Irena, Norm Conard, the girls’ history teacher and now executive director of the museum, and I completed a series of podcasts together which can be heard at Bobfordshistory.com.
Our seventh grade girls were so enthralled with discovering this story they wrote a play, “Life in a Jar.” Named so because Irena had kept the Jewish names of the children she helped inside a jar buried in a friend's backyard in hopes of one day reuniting the families. Sadly, most families did not survive, but the children did.
After the war, discussions were not held on what happened. There were strong sentiments on all sides as there always is after a major war especially where atrocities occurred.
At least the girls had brought this courageous lost story about Irena and her team out, and they were now receiving acclaim.
The girls wanted to find where Irena was buried. In contacting the Jewish Federation, Polish Government and using new burial data methods, nothing was coming up. They had hit a dead end.
Then, one day they received a letter from the Jewish Federation. There were no grave records because 95-year-old Irena Sendler was still ALIVE!
“Oh my God,” the story continues. What are three eighth grade girls to do...go to Warsaw, of course!
(To be continued)
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