Irena Sendler

About Irena Sendler 

Irena Krzysnowska was born on February 15, 1910. In the Polish city of Otwock, to a

 Catholic family. Her father Stanislaw was a doctor with socialist views, most of  his Patients came from the town’s Jewish residents, 20 miles southeast of Warsaw. In 1931, Irena married Michislaw Sendler. The couple did not have children in 1947 They divorced. She married a Jewish friend from the university named Stefan Zagrazembsky, who had three children, one of whom died in childbirth, and then remarried to her first husband Michislav Sandler, and then divorced again.After the outbreak of the war, she worked as a social worker. She was buried in Pobonzki Cemetery in Poland

Irena as a hero

Irena Sendler obtained a permit from the Warsaw Municipality to allow her to enter the ghetto and check the sanitation conditions. She assisted the Jewish Welfare Organization in smuggling Jews out of the ghetto to the “Aryan” side of Warsaw and helped them find hiding places.

In the fall of 1942, after the deportation of some 280,000 Jews from Warsaw to Treblinka, Zagota, the Jewish Relief Council, was established, and Sendler became one of its major activities. The council cared for thousands of Jews who tried to survive in hiding, sought refuge for them and paid for their hiding and medical treatment for them.

In September 1943, she exploited her relationships with orphanages and abandoned children’s institutions to send Jewish children to them. On October 20, 1943, Sendler was arrested for helping the Jews. She was sentenced to death and sent to the notorious Fabiak prison, but underground activists succeeded in bribing officials and thus obtained her release.

Irena Sendler saved 2,500  jews. In 1965 she become a “Righteous Among the Nations”. Irena Candidated to a “Nobel prize for peace”.