So it’s 1939 and you are a 29-year-old Polish woman living your perfectly average life in Warsaw not hassling anyone. Germany, under the Nazi regime, has just invaded your country and launched WW2 and all of the Jewish people in Warsaw have been forced to live in a walled-off ghetto.

What do you do?

Well, if you’re Irena Sendler you mastermind risky rescue ops for the Jewish youth of Warsaw.

Irena who had studied to be a social worker and nurse before the war repurposed those mad skills and during the war worked as part of the Zegota, a polish resistance force who was actually pretty successful in undermining the local Nazi forces. For Irena specifically, this meant working as a social worker in the Jewish Warsaw ghetto.

Let me explain:

Fortunately (it feels so wrong to type that in regards to Nazi Germany) Nazi Germany wanted to give the appearance that they weren’t being inhumane towards their Jewish citizens and various government workers were allowed to enter the Warsaw ghetto to perform maintenance and provide healthcare and the like. Although just to be absolutely clear, the conditions in which these people were forced to live were still deplorable. Most notably there was a serious typhoid outbreak directly due to the squalid conditions... fuck fucking Nazis.

However, this token effort to look less like psychotic racists was all the opportunity the Zegota needed. Irena herself oversaw a group of social workers who would regularly enter the ghetto under the pretense of maintaining a decent standard of living but would instead smuggle Jewish children out with them.

Yep, Oskar Schindler who... this damn woman literally walked passed armed Nazi soldiers with Jewish infants hidden in medical bags and toolkits. Older children were smuggled out in ambulances and in suitcases loaded onto work trolleys. Sometimes infants were even wrapped up like packages and older children were moved out in sacks... needs must as they say. This was so dangerous that they initially only smuggled out orphan children, as they felt only the orphans were in dire enough straits to face the risks. However, Irena quickly saw the writing on the wall and in short order was talking Jewish families into relinquishing their children. Again this was risky to the children themselves, but Irena could see exactly what was coming.

Digest that for a moment, this woman loaded Jewish children into suitcases, packed them onto a trolley and wheeled them out passed armed Nazi soldiers who would have shot her in the head. Not once, not twice... but every day for years.

Years

The Warsaw ghetto was established in 1940 and Irena’s group of a poultry 20 people (mostly female) over the course of 3 years saved over 2,500 children. Sadly in 1943 the remaining residents were murdered onsite or shipped off to concentration camps and the site itself was burnt to the ground. By that time the Nazi regime was less concerned with their crimes against humanity being obvious to the rest of the world. Again fuck Nazis.

But what became of Irena?

She got busted in 1943 just prior to the burning of the ghetto. Fortunately, they wanted to torture her for information on the Jewish children she’d smuggled out and the internal operations of the Zegota, so Irena wasn’t immediately executed as was the typical MO of the Gestapo.

Sorry that ‘fortunately’ is so morbid in context... but ya know in morbid times... being tortured is actually fortunate...

So Irena was arrested, imprisoned, and faced pretty horrific torture (I’ll spare you but it’s awful). She pretty much just gave the Nazi’s the finger though (and, more importantly not a damn piece of information) and they eventually gave up and arranged to have her executed. Here it gets a little lighter, in that Irena never arrived at the concentration camp, members of the Zegota bribed several soldiers and she was dumped on the side of a road to be collected by other Zegota members. By that time both of her legs were broken and her feet were shattered so severely that it hobbled her for life... but didn’t particularly slow her down all the much.

Though after all this... she retired to a quiet life in the country right? Surely?

Nope, she went straight back to helping smuggle Jewish people out of Poland by working as a nurse until the end of the war.

She didn’t even retire after the war.

After the war, this badass spent years locating the children she had saved and reuniting them with their families. How? Well, she noted the names of every family she helped and where their children had been placed on slips of cigarette paper which she then placed in glass bottles; the bottles were then buried in the yard of a trusted friend for safekeeping. After the war she dug them back up and off she went into the chaos of post-war Poland to locate all the people she could.

You know what makes Irena the baddest badass though... years later whilst giving an interview (I’ll link at the bottom) she had this to say about her incredible life:

"I was brought up to believe that a person must be rescued when drowning, regardless of religion and nationality."

"The term 'hero' irritates me greatly. The opposite is true. I continue to have pangs of conscience that I did so little."

It’s estimated that she personally saved around 400 Jewish children.

In 2007 Irena was nominated for a noble peace prize which she should have damn well gotten but sadly didn’t. This is especially egregious since she died in 2008 and noble peace prizes are not awarded posthumously. So, she’s been forever denied that recognition just like she was denied pretty much every other. Even in Poland (due to enduring racism) Irena’s actions were largely unknown until 1995 and aren’t particularly well recognized today. Although since 1995 she has been honored in several other notable ways including receiving the Audrey Hepburn Humanitarian Award.

I try to personally rectify Irena’s near-complete obscurity by talking about her anytime WW2 is brought up... and women's lives... and... just anytime actually, people are starting to complain... and I hope you’ll talk about her too after this.

Irena Sendler was a badass and we should all know her story and celebrate the sheer fucking humble badassery that has a person walking past men with guns casually lugging contraband kids and still has them lamenting years later that they just didn’t do enough.

The article about the interview I mentioned:

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2007/mar/15/secondworldwar.poland

And an entire website dedicated to Irena Sendler:

https://irenasendler.org/

Apparently there’s also a god-awful telemovie that I’m off to watch.

For anyone wondering what prompted another of these so soon I’d like to say it’s the positive feedback I got and in a way it is. That’s why I’m specifically doing another of these posts here... but also a man opened his stupid arsed mouth yesterday and announced proudly that women had never done much for the world (in the grand scheme of things) and here we are... men piss me off. I wish they didn’t; in that, I wish I were indifferent to them and deaf to their frankly laughable and deliberately offensive claims. But I’m not there yet. So currently I am trying to simply channel my outrage into something positive.

Men like that will never agree that women are worth anything and it’s not my job to convince them.

A man’s misogyny is not my problem.

I’m focusing on women from here on out.