Irena Shoemaker

In 1942, she worked as a senior manager in the Warsaw Municipality, in the relief department. She joined the Zagota organization, run by the Polish government in exile in London with the help of Jews. Nicknames in the Polish underground was Yolanta and her main business there was to rescue Jewish children. She risked her life in rescue and rescue operations with the help of people who enlisted for help, forging documents giving Jews Christian names and obtaining sick certificates designed to deter the Nazis from spreading infectious diseases. Along with her assistant, Irena Schultz, she entered the ghetto on the grounds of treating patients and thus ran away for money, food, medicine and clothing.

Later, she began smuggling children from the ghetto to monasteries
or to Christian families, using forged papers they arranged underground.
Some of the children said that their Jewish parents were adoptive, to facilitate their separation from
their parents. Some children were smuggled out in the early morning under the passenger seats in a
streetcar that crossed the ghetto. Some were driven in a private car which also had a dog. The dog was
trained to bark as the children cried and his barking silenced the cry of the children so that the
crying could not be heard outside the car.

Irena Shoemaker kept a precise record of the children fleeing the ghetto, so that they could be located at the end of the war and returned to their families. The notes were buried in glass in the ground in her home garden. In all, this way saved about 2,500 Jewish children.

n October 1943, the Gestapo arrested her and tortured her to
give the names of the children she rescued, but it was not broken.
She was sentenced to death, along with another 39 prisoners, but
was rescued with the help of a guard, who received bribes from her
underground friends. She was then put on a list of already executed
prisoners and lived underground.
After the war, she worked in the Polish Ministry of Health.
Her underground work, which was subordinate to the exile government
in London,
suspected her of communists, but they feared it would hurt her.
In 1965, Yad Vashem awarded her the title of Righteous Among the
Nations and in 1991 she received Israeli citizenship.

Former Polish President Lech Kaczynski suggested during his visit
to Israel that the state co-sponsor Poland with Irena Shoemaker’s
nomination for a Nobel Peace Prize. Yad Vashem stated that although
it did not oppose the proposal, it would have preferred that the
award be presented to all Righteous Among the Nations. In 2009,
a movie was released in her memory, called “The Brave Heart of
Irena Shoemaker,” which tells the story of her life and eventually
has her film from her old days. Composer Kobi Osher told a TV show
on Channel 10 that Irena’s life story excited him greatly and he
wrote a symphonic piece in her honor when documentary footage taken
with her is combined with the work.

In May 2013, the road was named the extension opposite the Museum
of Polish Jewish History in Warsaw, and exits from Mordechai
Anilewicz Street (near Ludwig Zamenhof Street), “Shoemaker’s Alley”
to its name.
Irena Shoemaker was awarded the 2003 White Eagle Award and has
been granted the honorary citizenship of Warsaw and Trachin
(a town near where she lived when she was a child). She was also
the Nobel Peace Prize nominee.
Personal life Irena Shoemaker married Michislaw Shoemaker in 1931.
The couple had no children and in 1947 they divorced.
She then married a Jewish friend from the university named Stefan
Zagrazembsky. They had three children, one of whom passed away at
birth. She then remarried to her first husband Michislav Sandler,
and then divorced again.

bibliography:
https://he.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D7%90%D7%99%D7%A8%D7%A0%D7%94_%D7%A1%D7%A0%D7%93%D7%9C%D7%A8