When Adam Celnikier died of heart trouble in 1961, only in his late forties, their tumultuous love story—which had already ended in divorce and seen the infant death of one of their three children—was also part of what Irena buried. Devastated by a string of postwar losses, Irena turned passionately to religion for the first time since her adolescence, and her return to Catholicism was almost certainly a motivating factor in her decision to remarry Mietek Sendler that decade. It was also one reason why, in her eighties and nineties and as a devout elderly woman, Irena glossed over certain complex parts of their bohemian wartime romances.
It was impossible to speak of Irena’s stories in communist Poland. But many of the infants and toddlers whom Irena and her network of friends helped to save from the ghetto lived after the war in Israel, the United States, or Canada, and by the mid-1960s the youngest of them were in their twenties. In the West, the stories of Irena’s children were taking hold and growing. In 1965, based on that burgeoning body of testimony—and especially on the wartime testimony of Jonas Turkow—Yad Vashem, the Holocaust memorial organization in Israel, awarded Irena Sendler its highest honor. They added her name to the list of those who are “Righteous Among the Nations” and planted in her honor an olive tree on the Mount of Remembrance. According to Jewish tradition, there are in every generation a tiny number of people whose goodness renovates the entire world in the face of evil, and Irena was named among them. So, too, in time were Jaga Piotrowska, Maria Kukulska, Irka [Irena] Schultz, Maria Palester, Jadwiga Deneka, Władysława Marynowska, Janka Grabowska, Julian and Halina Grobelny, and even Jan Dobraczyński. The Soviets, however, refused to authorize Irena’s passport so she could travel to Jerusalem to accept the award. Irena had been branded a decadent Western dissident and a public menace.
So the story in Poland again faded from memory. By the late 1970s, many of those who had survived the war were disappearing. One day in 1979, Irena, Iza, and Jaga met, along with another woman in their old network, and they jointly authored a statement that recorded for posterity the history of their astonishing collaboration as young women. That statement reads, “We estimate (today after 40 years it is difficult to determine it exactly) the number of children which Żegota helped in various ways to be around 2,500.” Irena was always emphatic that she did not save them alone. “Every time people said that she saved 2,500 Jewish children’s lives,” Yoram Gross—the wartime boy known as Jerzy—recalls, “she corrected this by saying that she doesn’t know the exact number and that she was saving the children together with friends that helped her.” And, as Irena said late in life, “I want everyone to know that, while I was coordinating our efforts, we were about twenty to twenty-five people. I did not do it alone.” After the war, when Irena made a list of all the people in Warsaw who took part in her network to help Jewish families and save their children, it was fourteen pages long, and the names in fact numbered in the dozens upon dozens. What Irena never forgot was that she was simply one member of a vast collective effort of decency. She did not want the world to forget either.
That same year, in 1979, at an international conference on Holocaust rescuers and their stories, just as research into the buried history of the “Righteous” was being unearthed and debated, a Professor Friedman stood up before a room of listeners and said that, in time, he believed there would be hundreds of inspiring stories coming to light in Poland. “If we knew,” he told the crowd that day, “the names of all the noble people who risked their lives to save Jews, the area around Yad Vashem would be full of trees and would turn into a forest.” But it was not until the beginning of glasnost in the late 1980s, when she was in her seventies, that Irena was able to meet, face-to-face again in Israel, many of the children whose lives she saved. Those scenes of reunion were inspiring and heartbreaking. These children only knew her—if they knew her at all as toddlers or infants—as “Jolanta.” But she was the last face of their childhood.
It wasn’t until the 1990s, after the end of the Cold War, that the story was finally able to be told in Poland. The story was recovered in the mainstream press by a group of American schoolchildren and their history teacher in Kansas, whose story is told in the memoir Life in a Jar. By the turn of the millennium, when the truth was being reported, celebrated at last, and remembered collectively, Irena was among the last living survivors of that network, already in her nineties. And parts of the truth were already lost to history. “I only have recourse to the memories burned into my mind by the events of those days,” Irena said when she turned, decades after the war, to putting down her story on paper.
In 2003, some of the children she helped to save wrote a joint letter nominating Irena Sendler for the Nobel Peace Prize. They nominated her again in 2007, and momentum was building. Press around the world began to notice. The committee awarded the honor that year instead to Al Gore for his work on global warming, but few doubted that in time Irena Sendler would be a laureate. However, Irena herself crossly brushed aside this talk of awards and honors. “Heroes,” she said, “do extraordinary things. What I did was not an extraordinary thing. It was normal.” She walked with the spirits of those they could not save, with the faces in her dreams of those who perished.
And time now was scarce and precious. In 2008, at the age of ninety-eight, having borne witness not just to the better part of a century but also to the lives of thousands who survived because of her unwavering moral compass, Irena Sendler died peacefully in Warsaw, surrounded by several of “her” children. She is buried in a wooded cemetery in Warsaw, amid a small copse of trees where the leaves fall gently in the autumn, and perhaps it is a mark of her fame now that on November 1 her simple tombstone is ablaze with candles and awash with small bouquets of flowers. And it is not only in November that one finds small votive candles burning there. In the hush of a Polish forest, where songbirds still speak their welcome to those who listen, the flame of her memory burns on quietly in the shadows, remembered. On her gravestone are only the dates of her life and the names of her parents. But if we could choose a more elaborate epitaph, perhaps we would engrave the words of Mahatma Gandhi, who once said, “A small body of determined spirits fired by an unquenchable faith in their mission can alter the course of history.” Such were Irena and all her friends, and this is their story.
Afterword
Author’s Note on the Story of Irena’s Children
What happened in Warsaw during the German occupation and what this group of people—led by Irena Sendler—achieved is, by any measure, an astonishing tale, with all the elements of great fiction. This book, however, is a work of nonfiction in all its essentials. My sources for this book have been the extensive record, which includes Irena Sendler’s handwritten memoirs and her recorded interviews, the testimony of the children she saved and those with whom she worked (and their children), memoirs and biographies of those whose stories intersect with hers, published interviews, private conversations, academic histories on occupied Warsaw, firsthand visits to many of the sites described, and extensive research at archives in Warsaw, Berlin, London, New York City, and Jerusalem.
Frequently, however, as with any secret “cell,” the historical record is conflicting or some of the connecting threads of the story are missing. There are aspects of this story that were too dangerous to record in the years after the war, especially during the communist period in Poland, and there are cases where testimony was necessarily selective. Irena herself sometimes wrote—especially about Adam—using coded names that have to be deciphered, and there is the question of how we balance the truth of youthful indiscretions with cases of late-life religious conversions. There are the stories we want to tell of the glorious dead for our own emotional purposes. Above all, there are the competing memories, recounted decades later, of multiple witnesses to singular events that were, by necessity, only dimly understood even in the moment of living them, and in the news reporting and published transcriptions of interviews, there is the trace of everything that is lost in
translation.
Not everyone wanted his or her story told—no matter how heroic—in the complicated years that followed the liberation of Warsaw, and in this account I do not pretend to be encyclopedic. I gesture toward some of the untold stories and the names lost to this history (although not always lost to other stories) in the notes with which this book concludes. Some of Irena’s most important collaborators—men and women like Wanda Drozdowska-Rogowicz, Izabela Kuczkowska, Zofia Patecka, Róża Zawadzka, Wincenty Ferster, Jadwiga Bilwin, and Helena Merenholc, among others—are mentioned here either only in passing or not at all. It is most often for the simple reason that I was not able to find enough information about their lives and wartime activities to tell their stories. It is also because there is no way to tell in one book the story of twenty or thirty heroes and do them any justice. But Irena considered these men and women among her most fearless collaborators.
I should note as well that this is the biography only of the early part of Irena Sendler’s life. I do not attempt to document here the very complex family, romantic, and political experiences that shaped her long life after 1945, except in a very brief coda. The story of Stalinism and post-Stalinism in Poland was its own kind of Holocaust, and Irena faced during that period another set of dangers and repressions entirely.
In all these instances, I have had to weigh the veracity of one set of details over the other and drawn reasonable inferences based on common sense, my assessment of private motives, and the entire body of evidence. When it has seemed clear to me, despite the lacunae, that there is only one way to make sense of the disparate facts and how they are connected to each other, based on what is known of the context and the character of the person in question, I have told the story, without further qualification, as I believe it must have happened. That has included, in some instances, extrapolating from historical context to establish the order of events and the particular details of connections and meetings between individuals within the cell whose identity was left unspecified. The details are, in all cases, based on the scaffolding of known facts, but where there are gaps in that scaffolding—and some gaps are significant—I have made the leap of inference based on my best judgment and larger knowledge of the period and the people about whom I am writing. Another writer might have told a different story based on this same scaffolding. For any readers interested in following in my footsteps and drawing their own, perhaps different, conclusions, my research can be tracked in the notes in the final pages, or I welcome correspondence from readers to my email address at my academic institution.
In order to tell this story, I have taken only one other significant liberty with the archives and historical sources. In several instances, I have offered insight into a character’s own thoughts or feelings, or I have offered reframed dialogue. Where material is presented in italics, it represents speech that is not present or is not present in this same form in the historical record. These passages, instead, are based on historical records of a conversation or experience, based on extrapolation from factual scaffolding as noted above, or based on my comprehensive sense of the character and personalities of these individuals after extensive research and gathering of recollections about them. Often this work of extrapolation and historical reconstruction has been necessarily piecemeal. In describing, for example, New Year’s Eve in 1942, the materials used in assembling that scene range from an old snapshot of the friends taken that night and recollections of the Kukulska apartment by one of the witnesses to historical information on Polish New Year traditions, other World War II–era memoirs, and an overarching sense of what we know about the personalities of the individuals present and the relationships among them. In other cases, Irena recorded in her memoirs the precise words of what others said to her in a conversation (words placed in quotation marks here) but only summarized the content and not the precise language of her response to those words. Where the summarized content has been presented as speech in this book, the extrapolated speech (or thoughts) have been presented in italics. I have in a few instances also modified past-tense eyewitness testimony to the present tense in order to tell the story as these people experienced it. And in writing from an individual character’s perspective to describe what he or she would have seen and experienced, especially in scenes narrating events and places in Warsaw, I have relied extensively on historical photographs, other eyewitness accounts, maps, and oral history interviews. My major sources are noted throughout, and all sources are listed in the bibliography.
This is history, through a glass darkly, with all the attendant perils of the great darkness that was the Holocaust in Poland both during the Second World War and in the decades of communist rule that followed. I have used in all cases my best judgment as a historian and scholar and then proceeded to get on with telling the story of an astonishing group of men and women who saved from the darkness thousands of children.
Irena Sendler as a young woman. Yad Vashem
1940–1943, ghetto market. Yad Vashem
1941, street children in the Warsaw ghetto. United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, courtesy of Günther Schwarberg
Dr. Helena Radlińska Mateusz Opasiński, CC ASA 3.0
Dr. Ludwik Hirszfeld Yad Vashem
1941, a Jewish policeman speaks with a woman on the street in the Warsaw ghetto. United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, courtesy of Günther Schwarberg
Irena in her office at the welfare department. East News Poland
1940, the children of the Korczak orphanage in the ghetto. Ghetto Fighters’ House Museum
Dr. Janusz Korczak with several orphans in his institution. Yad Vashem
1942, Jews from the Warsaw ghetto boarding trains at the Umschlagplatz during the deportations. United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, courtesy of Jerzy Tomaszewski
Irena’s parents, Stanisław and Janina Krzyżanowski. East News Poland
Irena’s friend and collaborator, Ala Gołąb-Grynberg, chief nurse of the Warsaw ghetto. Courtesy of the Gołąb-Grynberg family
Adam Celnikier East News Poland
Spring 1943, Jews marched to the Umschlagplatz at the end of the Jewish ghetto uprising. National Archives and Records Administration
Spring 1943, Jews led by the SS to the deportation trains at the end of the Jewish ghetto uprising. National Archives and Records Administration
Spring 1943, Jews marched to the Umschlagplatz for deportation at the end of the Jewish ghetto uprising. National Archives and Records Administration
SS soldiers dragging a Jew in the street during an Aktion in the ghetto. Yad Vashem
Ala’s daughter, Rami Gołąb-Grynberg (right), and Elżbieta Strzałecka (left), whose family hid Rami. Courtesy of the Gołąb-Grynberg family
1943, Jewish child in hiding poses outside in a garden wearing her First Communion dress. United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, courtesy of Alicia Fajnsztejn Weinsberg
Julian Grobelny, Irena’s friend and collaborator in Żegota. Yad Vashem
Pawiak Prison, where Irena and many of her friends were incarcerated by the Gestapo. Yad Vashem
Krzyštof Palester (right), the teenaged son of Irena’s friends Maria and Henryk Palester, with two female medics during the Warsaw uprising. Photograph by Joachim Joachimczyk
1944, Home Army fighters among rubble during the Warsaw uprising. Yad Vashem
Summer 1944, members of the Polish underground on a tank they have stolen during the uprising. Yad Vashem
May 1, 1945, view of the ruins of the Warsaw ghetto. Pictured in the middle are the walls of Pawiak Prison. United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, courtesy of Juliusz Bogdan Deczkowski
July 1, 1945, survivors of the Jewish underground pose after the war atop the ruins of the bunker at number 18, Miła Street, in the former ghetto. United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, courtesy of Leah Hammerstein Silverstein
1945: Jadwiga Strzałecka with her daughter, Elżbieta (second from right), and three Jewish girls, including Rami Gołąb-Grynberg
(second from left). Courtesy of the Gołąb-Grynberg family
Adam and Irena, with their first child, after the war. East News Poland
Irena Sendler as an elderly woman, when the world was rediscovering her story. East News Poland
Acknowledgments
Perhaps more than any other book I have written, this is a story in which I am conscious of the immense debt that I owe to others in the telling of it. I would like to begin by thanking the children—who are not now children at all—for revisiting this past with me and for sharing their experiences. I would like to thank, at the Association of “Children of the Holocaust” in Poland, Elżbieta Ficowska, Marian Kalwary, Katarzyna Meloch, and Joanna Sobolewska for speaking with me. The late Yoram Gross, who passed away just as this book was entering production, shared with me by email his recollections of Irena and his boyhood, and Janina Goldhar shared with me her recollections of the Palester family and her youth in Poland. In Warsaw, I was fortunate to speak with Andrzej Marynowski and Janina Zgrzembska. My thanks to the family of Ala Gołąb-Grynberg, who generously shared information and photographs. I also wish to thank, for information, conversation, connections, or critiques that contributed to this book, all the members of that much-loved tribe, the “Cockneys” (you know who you are), as well as Mirosława Pałaszewska, the Nalven family, Aviva Fattai-Valevski, Avi Valevski, Warren Perley, Les Train, David Suchoff, Anna Mieszkowska, Aleksander Kopiński, Emmanuel Gradoux-Matt, Erica Mazzeo, Charlene Mazzeo, Mark Lee, Halina Grubowska, Mary Skinner, Stacy Perman, Axel Witte, Mark Anderson, and Klara Jackl at the Museum of the History of Polish Jews. For research assistance and translation work, I am grateful to Marta Kessler, Zofia Nierodzinska, Olek Lato, and Phillip Goss, and I must offer an immense acknowledgment and thanks to my primary research partner and Warsaw-based translator, University of Warsaw doctoral student Maria Piątkowska, without whom this book simply could not have been written.
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