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Micah Coate

Irena (Part 1of2)

Updated: Apr 29

“To the weak I became weak, to win the weak. I have become all things to all people so that by all possible means I might save some.” I Corinthians 9:22 NIV

Irena Sender was born on February 15, 1910, in Warsaw, Poland. She was raised in the Catholic faith and was named after St. Irene of Rome. Her naming day was October 20.


Irena’s mother, Janina, would be in her life for many years. Yet her father, Stanslaw, was not. He was a medical doctor and humanitarian. He made an effort to treat Jewish people and sometimes treated them without charge. This led him to work within the Jewish community in Otwock, a town 15 miles southeast of Warsaw. Stanslaw felt that he had a moral duty to serve those who were poor and outcast. But in the Typhus outbreak in 1917, the 43-year-old doctor contracted the disease from the very people he treated. Stanslaw died from Typhus when Irena was only seven years old. But the mark he left on his young daughter would turn out to be legendary.


But as a 33-year-old woman in the very midst of the Warsaw Ghetto, Irena didn’t know that. Nor did she fully understand what the cost of saving Jewish children from the Ghetto might be. As she stood in the candlelit house impatiently waiting for the parents to say goodbye to their newborn daughter, all Irena could think about was her father and all that he taught her by word and action. In the circumstances she had now placed herself in, Irena wondered if she would soon join him.


Time would tell.

The minutes had run out. Irena nearly had to pry the fragile baby from her mother’s grip. There was just no more time to say goodbye. And even though Irena repeatedly assured the child’s mother that they would be reunited with the parents after the war, it never got easy for her to talk mothers out of their children, much less promise the impossible. While she tried to give as much hope as she could muster under the circumstances, Irena believed most parents knew they’d never see their child again. Yet they were trusting this young Polish social worker to save their child’s life from the near-certain death of the Warsaw Ghetto.


Irena quickly placed three drops of luminal (phenobarbital) in the baby’s mouth. As the child immediately began to fade in Irena’s left arm, she opened the tool box on the ground with her right hand, placing a relatively clean cloth on the bottom of the tool box and along the sides. The child was already unconscious in the short time Irena took to prepare the makeshift cradle. While all babies at the time were malnourished and weak, Irena always tried to find the right balance between under and over sedation. This time Irena thought she might have given too much. The especially delicate state of the baby caused her to second-guess. But again, there was no time for overthinking. The truck outside revved its engine as a sign to hurry up. Unknown to Irena, two SS guards turned onto the street outside only 50 yards from the house.


Once the child was laid inside the perforated tool box and covered with clean pieces of cloth, Irena put on a pair of thin rubber gloves and placed layers of blood-soiled dressings and bandages on top of the baby. She tried to shield the parents from seeing this part of the transfer by using her body to cover the stealth movements of her hands.


Mechanically, Irena closed the lid to the box, sealing the sleeping infant inside. She stood up with the toolbox in hand, gave a solemn nod to the grieving parents, stepped outside, and closed the door. As she descended the five stairs to the waiting truck on the street, Irena could see the SS guards walking towards her from the corner of her eye.


As quickly as she could move without raising suspicion, Irena opened the tailgate to the morgue wagon and forcibly shoved the tool box in between the cold legs of a corpse on the bottom of the large pile of bodies. Such were the number of dead stacked in the back of the truck that Irena struggled to close the tailgate. Her heart was beating so loudly in her ears that she didn’t notice the footsteps approaching behind her. Just when she managed to close the gate, a hand grabbed her shoulder and spun her around.


Irena gasped! These were not Jewish Police, nor the Polish “Blue” Police, nor were they just German officers. These were SS guards and they were unpredictable, their brutality being unrivaled. Before Irena could say anything, the solider barked orders. Trying to control her shaking hands, Irena showed her papers: “Department of Social Welfare and Public Health of the City of Warsaw.” While one guard started to scrutinize Irena’s papers, his partner opened the tailgate only to recoil, not at the sight of the cold pile of lifeless bodies but being too close to them. Irena was in utter shock. She always feared being caught but never imagined it would look like this. The guard pointed to the toolbox with his rifle and asked Irena what was in it. Irena didn’t speak German but she clearly knew what he wanted. “Typhus” was the only word she knew the guard would understand. “Soiled Typhus rags,” she repeated. The two guards could see Irena was a nurse from her uniform, so it wasn’t out of place for her to be working with the sick and dying. Yet they seemed unconvinced.


The guard returned Irena’s identification papers and motioned for her to open the toolbox. Her heart utterly sank, and she felt her throat began to seize up. But the guards could not discern her panic. Irena had always been bold and courageous, and in this time when it took all her strength just to keep her composure, she gambled that a feigned fearlessness would work towards her advantage. Everything depended on this, not only this baby’s life and her own life but the lives of thousands of children that Irena and so many others had helped escape the inevitable death of the Ghetto.


In an instant, as Irena stepped toward the toolbox, it was almost as if her life flashed before her eyes. The raw emotions stirred by her present encounter with the Nazis induced a few particular memories that soared back into her mind in vivid and tangible detail, and all she could see was the face of Rachela.


When Irena was 13 years of age, Rachela was the only Jewish girl in her class who was routinely discriminated against and taunted by classmates for various reasons. One day Irena saw Rachela being beaten in the park next to their school by two larger girls. Irena did not hesitate to help. She jumped on the girls and started to throw her fists in blind rage. The two attackers left Rachela only to pummel Irena unconscious. After this time Irena was stereotyped by the school as a “Jew lover” and was castigated by many of her Polish “friends.” Yet, among the scorn and shame that Irena felt, there remained a quiet pride in her heart for knowing that what she did was ultimately right. This caused her to continue to stand on the moral convictions instilled in her by her father who once told his daughter: “If you see a man drowning, you must try to save him even if you cannot swim.”


His death left a large hole in Irena’s heart, yet she strove to live up to his example of caring for outcasts. And so, as the years passed, Irena continued to find herself at odds with the spirit of the time. In her last year of high school, Irena wrote a paper titled, “Repairing Poland” in which she argued that Poland’s economic and political chaos was wrongly placed on minority groups, especially the Jews. It was not received well and served as a precursor to her time in college. In the early 1930s Irena was a student in the University of Warsaw. By this time the political landscape had only gotten worse, and anti-semitic doctrines and propaganda increased as Hitler’s rhetoric had begun to take root in Poland. “Jews were singled out first for intellectual assault, cloaked in academic finesse and scientific reason. But before long that facade was abandoned in favor of fists and batons.” 1


The other memory that intruded upon Irena’s mind was one she hadn’t thought about for years as she had tried hard to keep it buried because of its brutality. A young Jewish woman was thrown out of a two-story building at the University. The woman didn’t die, but the school basically did nothing against the violent attack. One feeble way the university sought to control the growing violence on campus was through segregation. In lecture halls certain benches were only for Jews, known as “Ghetto Benches,” while the rest were for “Aryans." One day Irena was so overcome by the university’s treatment of minorities that as she entered the lecture hall, she sat down in the front row of the Jewish bench. Everyone’s eyes were on her in disbelief. When asked for a response by the professor, Irena admittedly replied to everyone, “Today I am a Jew!” She was immediately suspended from school. When explaining to her mother as to why she did it, Irena said, “I had to do it. It was a need of my heart.” 2


Once Irena’s hand touched the toolbox with the sedated infant inside, her recollection snapped back to the present reality. Amongst the fear, Irena had always been courageous. And now all the events in her life seemed to culminate in this very real moment where if the baby was found, Irena would be taken as a prisoner, interrogated, tortured, and most likely murdered.


Everything hinged on this act of boldness.


So, acting as if she were more perturbed than scared, Irena opened the two latches of the toolbox and boldly swung open the lid. She thrust her hand into the toolbox and grabbed a handful of the rank rags and bandages. She held them out. The motionless body of the infant was clearly revealed but just out of sight from the guards, who stood only five feet away. All it took was for them to take one step closer to see the newborn sleeping in the box.


Not surprisingly for SS guards, they seemed more disgusted at the sight of soiled rags than the truck full of corpses. With a look of revulsion, and a hand signal of dismissal, they took a step back and commanded Irena to leave.

Still in character, Irena thew the rags back into the box and shut the tailgate. She jumped into the passenger seat of the truck and looked at the driver, one of the few Poles who was rewarded for doing these good deeds for a few hundred zolty. Tears welled up in Irena’s eyes as her heart released all the stirring emotions that had been suppressed not only in the last few minutes but in the last few years.


Words fail to describe what one feels like when great fear and great joy collide, not to mention when simultaneous exhaustion and adrenaline are thrown into the mix. Irena’s burden of fears and pains was great, but it was ultimately outweighed by the joyous relief of not being caught. After the child was dropped off with her false identity documents at the caretakers house, and the truck driver was paid for the delivery, Irena walked home slowly, thankful to be alive but reminiscing about better times. Before the Nazi invasion, Irena would have been coming home to a joyful celebration with friends and family as October 20 was her naming day. And although Irena was born on February 15, her naming day was celebrated on October 20, the saint’s day whom Irena was named after. She was 33 years old. Much like a birthday, naming days were usually special and happy celebrations, but after five years of Nazi occupation, there was very little happiness to be had by anyone. Irena went to bed that night saddened at everything the Nazis had taken, but grateful she herself had not been taken by them. Irena fell asleep quickly. She slept a bit more peacefully that night than normal, that was until the violent pounding on the door.


Micah Coate, President and Host of Salvation and Stuff

Works Cited: 1. With some artistic freedom this was largely taken from Jack Mayer’s, Life in a Jar, The Irena Sendler Project, Long Tail Press Middlebury, Vermont, 2011. 2. Mayer, Jack, Life in a Jar, The Irena Sendler Project, page 90. 3. Mayer, Jack, Life in a Jar, The Irena Sendler Project, page 91. 4. Irena Painting by Nancy Mergybrower, https://fineartamerica.com/featured/life-in-a-jar-irena-sendler-nancy-mergybrower.html.

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