Irena Sendler

Irena Stanisława Sendler, born Krzyżanowska on 15 February 1910 in Warsaw, was a Polish social worker, nurse, and humanitarian who worked in the Polish Underground during the German occupation of Warsaw in World War II. Using the alias Jolanta, she took charge of the children’s section of Żegota, the Polish Council to Aid Jews, starting in October 1943.

In the 1930s, Sendler’s social work was tied to the Free Polish University. From 1935 until October 1943, she was employed by Warsaw’s Department of Social Welfare and Public Health. During the war, she joined a mostly female network of department workers and volunteers in secret rescue efforts. Alongside many others, she helped smuggle Jewish children out of the Warsaw Ghetto, then gave them false documents and placed them with Polish families, orphanages, or Catholic convents, shielding them from the Holocaust.

The Gestapo suspected her underground involvement and arrested her in October 1943. She managed to conceal the list of rescued children’s names and hiding places, keeping it from German hands. Despite torture and imprisonment, she refused to disclose any details about her work or the children’s locations. Sentenced to death, she escaped execution on the scheduled day after Żegota bribed German officials to secure her release.

After the war, under communist rule in Poland, Sendler continued her social activism and held government positions. In 1965, Israel recognized her as Righteous Among the Nations. Her honors include the Gold Cross of Merit (1946) for saving Jews and the Order of the White Eagle, Poland’s highest award, given late in her life for her wartime humanitarian work.

Sendler was born to Stanisław Henryk Krzyżanowski, a doctor, and Janina Karolina Grzybowska. Baptized Irena Stanisława in Otwock in February 1917, she grew up there, about 15 miles southeast of Warsaw, in a town with a Jewish community. Her father, who treated poor patients—including Jews—for free, died of typhus in February 1917, caught from his patients. The Jewish community offered financial help to her mother, who declined. Sendler later lived in Tarczyn and Piotrków Trybunalski.

She studied law for two years from 1927, then Polish literature at the University of Warsaw, pausing her studies from 1932 to 1937. She opposed the ghetto benches system at Polish universities (introduced at Warsaw in 1937) and altered the “non-Jewish” mark on her grade card. She faced academic discipline for her activities and reputation as a communist and philo-Semite. By the war’s start, she had submitted her master’s thesis but not taken final exams. She joined the Union of Polish Democratic Youth in 1928 and later the Polish Socialist Party during the war. Negative recommendations from the university, citing her leftist views, repeatedly blocked her from teaching in Warsaw schools.

At the Free Polish University, she worked with social and educational units, meeting activists from the illegal Communist Party of Poland. Under Professor Helena Radlińska, she joined a group of social workers; over a dozen of these women later rescued Jews. Her fieldwork revealed severe poverty among Warsaw’s Jewish population. She worked at a legal and social help clinic, the Section for Mother and Child Assistance under the Citizen Committee for Helping the Unemployed. In 1934, she published two pieces on children born out of wedlock and their mothers. Her work took her through Warsaw’s poor neighborhoods, serving helpless, disadvantaged women. When the government dissolved the section in 1935, many members, including Sendler, joined the City of Warsaw’s Department of Social Welfare and Public Health.

She married Mieczysław Sendler in 1931. He was mobilized, captured in September 1939, and held as a POW until 1945; they divorced in 1947. She then married Stefan Zgrzembski (born Adam Celnikier), a Jewish wartime companion, with whom she had three children: Janina, Andrzej (who died in infancy), and Adam (who died of heart failure in 1999). Zgrzembski left the family in 1957 and died in 1961. Sendler remarried Mieczysław Sendler, divorcing again ten years later.

After the German invasion on 1 September 1939, occupation authorities removed Jews from the municipal Social Welfare Department where Sendler worked and barred aid to Warsaw’s Jewish citizens. Sendler, her colleagues, and activists from the department’s PPS cell began helping wounded and sick Polish soldiers. On her initiative, the cell produced false medical documents.