Irena Sendler
                                                             Post War 

                         “Heroes do extraordinary things.
                     What I did was not an extraordinary thing.
                                  It was normal.”
- Words of Irena


 

        When World War 2 ended, Irena came out of hiding. Irena returned to the tree were she hid the jar of names and tried to reunite the children to their family. This became the most difficult task because almost all the parents of the children that Irena saved died in the Treblinka death camp.

 

          Since their parents were no longer alive many of the remaining orphans (about 400) were taken to Israel by Adolph Berman who was a leader in Zegota. Others chose to stay with their adopted family. About 400 to 500 children’s where about are still not known. Some believe that they either did not survive or living some where in Poland or elsewhere, and might not know that they are Jewish.

 

         Later on Irena went back and resumed her career as a social worker and also became director of a vocational school. In 1965 she became a Righteous Gentiles honored by Yad Vashem. At that time Poland’s Communists  leaders would not let her travel to Israel to receive her award till 1993. In 1995 there was a plaque placed near what was once the Warsaw Ghetto honoring Irena heroics.   

 

          Irena’s story of what she had done during the war to help save all the Jewish children went untold to the world until 2000. A group of girls at Uniontown High School in Kansas, (Megan Stewart, Liz Cambers, Sabrina Coons and Jessica Shelton) wrote a play named ‘Life in a Jar’ it was a play that spoke about the wonderful things Irena did in her life time. Irena was stunned when she found out that a group of girls researched her and made a play about her. Irena said that she wished that the social workers that helped her save the children would have been here today so they could also be thanked as well. When the girls began their research of Irena they found only one small mention of her on any website (At last count there were over 80,000 sites on the internet mentioning Irena’s story today) in 2001 the girls went to Poland to research Irena’s story more.

 

 

          In July 2003 Irena won the Jan Karski award for Valor and Courage. Then, in 2007 she was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize, Even though she lost to Al Gore. On May 12th, 2008 at the age of 98 Irena Sendler died.