The woman who saved 2,500 children from the Warsaw ghetto

Witness History

BBC

History, Personal Journals, Society & Culture

4.4 • 1.6K Ratings

🗓️ 7 November 2024

⏱️ 10 minutes

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Summary

Irena Sendler was a Polish social worker who risked her life to save 2,500 Jewish children from the Warsaw ghetto during World War Two.

Irena, a Catholic, was able to enter the ghetto because of her job. She was soon smuggling in food, medicine and clothing; and smuggling out children.

And, as a member of the Zegota underground resistance movement, she recruited others to help. Some children were hidden in suitcases, potato sacks, and even inside coffins. Others escaped through sewers.

In 1943, Irena was caught and tortured by the Gestapo but her supporters bribed a guard and she was released. Irena continued her work under a false name until the end of the war.

In 1965, she was given one of Israel’s highest honours for non-Jews: the title of Righteous among the Nations. She died in 2008 at the age of 98.

Eye-witness accounts brought to life by archive. Witness History is for those fascinated by the past. We take you to the events that have shaped our world through the eyes of the people who were there. For nine minutes every day, we take you back in time and all over the world, to examine wars, coups, scientific discoveries, cultural moments and much more.

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Transcript

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0:27.2	Listen on BBC Sounds.
0:33.7	Hello, welcome to the witness history podcast from the BBC World Service with me Jane Wilkinson.
0:41.6	I'm taking you back through the archives to meet a Polish social worker who risked her life to save 2,000 Jewish children from the Warsaw ghetto during World War II.
0:54.1	Heroes do extraordinary things and to me what I did, Jewish children from the Warsaw ghetto during World War II.
0:59.7	Heroes do extraordinary things and to me what I did was not extraordinary.
1:01.2	It was just normal.
1:07.5	Those other words of Irina Sengler interviewed for a 1992 documentary film.
1:13.9	Back in 1939, she was a 29-year-old Catholic working in the Warsaw Welfare Department when the war began. At dawn on September 1st, the German war machine steamrollers into Poland.
1:20.3	The German Air Force begins its systematic bombing of undefended cities and towns of helpless women and
1:25.3	children. Poland's agony has come.
1:34.8	British Pathé. A year later, Poland was still under German occupation, and the Nazis ordered Warsaw's 375,000 Jews to move into an area of just three and a half square
1:41.9	kilometres, the Warsaw ghetto.
1:46.0	It was then sealed off with a three-meter-high wall, topped with barbed wire and patrolled by
1:52.2	armed guards. On one side were the so-called Aryans. The people Germany deemed the master
	...

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