Posted on 05/16/2008 10:23:58 AM PDT by NYer
Poland paused this week to pay tribute to Irena Sendler -- a Catholic social worker who risked her life during World War II to smuggle 2,500 children from the Warsaw Ghetto, saving them from the ravages of the Holocaust.
Sendler died Monday at 98, and after a large crowd flocked to her funeral at a Warsaw church yesterday, Poland's Orthodox chief rabbi offered prayers at her graveside.
Yad Vashem chairman Avner Shalev said: "Irena Sendler's courageous activities rescuing Jews during the Holocaust serve as a beacon of light to the world, inspiring hope and restoring faith in the innate goodness of mankind."...or as she put it in another interview, "Every child saved with my help is the justification of my existence on this Earth, and not a title to glory."
Using her position as a social worker, Sendler regularly entered the ghetto, smuggling around 2,500 children out in boxes, suitcases or hidden in trolleys.
The children were then placed with Polish families outside the ghetto, created by Nazi Germany in 1940 for the city's half a million strong Jewish population, and given new identities.
But in 1943 Sendler, who led the children' section of the Zegota organisation which helped Jews during the war, was arrested and tortured by the Gestapo.
She only escaped execution when Zegota managed to bribe some Nazi officials, who left her unconscious but alive with broken legs and arms in the woods.
"People who stand up for others, for the weak, are very rare. The world would have been a better place if there were more of them," Marek Edelman, the last surviving commander of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, said on national television....
Sendler was honoured with Israeli Yad Vashem Righteous Among the Nations medal in 1965 for her actions, and later made an honorary Israeli citizen.
She was also nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize last year but, despite her bravery, she denied she was a hero.
"The term 'hero' irritates me greatly. The opposite is true. I continue to have pangs of conscience that I did so little," Sendler said in one of her last interviews.
Today’s ‘saviours’ are the tireless volunteers who work the abortion mills, praying for the victims and educating those about to murder their own children.
This was the dear woman who was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize-she lost... to ALGORE!
A lot of times the world don’t work like it oughta.
But, she’s enjoying her reward now, no doubt. God bless her!
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Thank you for posting the images from the funeral.
May this wonderful woman have a special place in the Heavenly Kingdom, and may she be blessed real, real good!
What a precious soul this dear woman is!
I pray I someday will be able to meet her.
Beautiful story. Read it in the National Post (Canada) today. A child who she smuggled out of the ghetto at 6 months of age in a toolbox was the woman who cared for her in her final years. I’m still misty even though I read it this morning. We were blessed to have her among us.
Saints still walk among us.
Wow, what a great story.
She looks familiar. I once saw a show in which a Jewish man returned to the house where he hid from the Nazis. As a young boy he sometimes had to sit for hours on a small chair in a closet and remain quiet. This woman looks like the same person who hid the child years ago.
It might be the same person. There have been a lot of documentaries about people who rescued Jews during WW2.
Isn’t that a travesty? She should have been given the Nobel Prize years ago. Instead they give it to that blow hard nutcase Al Gore.
Shalom Dear Mrs. S!
I'll second that emotion!
I think she is beautiful inside and out!
That the blowhard fool named Goreghoul is deemed more a boon to humanity than this saint of a woman says too much about the degenereate state of our current world ... how disgusting that Gore was deemed more highly than this savior of children. [Gore changed his position of against abortion on demand to in favor of and defending the evil! It is that gore ‘change’ which caused so many Tennesseeans to reject the gore-spittlist in 2000.]
Al Gore has already received his reward. Mrs. Sendler has gone to receive hers, as well. Someday we can all hope to see her - even Al Gore, if he repents - young and beautiful again, surrounded by angels and saints praising her ... and her saying, “Oh, no! Stop that, it was nothing! I am unworthy servant - I only did my duty!”
As near as I could see, it was this: in their growing-up years, they had all seen their parents helping the needy, the sick, the down-and-out. They grew up thinking "Someone needs help, you help them."
The authors asked each person how long it took them, once they saw the immediate situation, to make the decision to step in and help the Jewish neighbor, co-worker, perfect stranger, knowing the consequences could be torture and death for themselves and their families. I remember their answers were mostly on the order of "Oh, it took a minute. I had to call my wife and ask if we had room for beds in the old root cellar."
Or, "Decision? I never made a decision. I just did it."
They did it because they were raised to think "That's what you do."
Don’t you wonder if that ‘value’ is dying in our culture. I think it still comes out in some of our military people, in fact I’ve known such amazing people. But how can the muck of TV convey that value system when the minds of the parents much less the children are focused upon ‘the idols’ and ‘philandering housewives’ and ‘drug sucking music pimps’?
Excellent points. “What you do” is you help people who need help, at any cost. I see that in the Knights of Columbus all the time.
And that's what's shocking in these times of self promotion, widespread vanity and glory seeking. Remember this while you don't watch Americans Idle!
Thanks for the post !
Right is right. And this dear woman is among the righteous.
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