She is credited with saving 2,500 children from the Nazis. But behind Irena's heroic story lie passionate secrets
The angel of Warsaw, Irena Sendler
She was dubbed the ‘angel of Warsaw’ by one newspaper. With her death this May, Irena Sendler’s legend took flight. A sheaf of obituaries paid tribute to the Polish woman who saved 2,500 Jewish children from the Nazi-created ghetto.
Irena Sendler saved twice as many Jews from death as the celebrated Oskar Schindler, who inspired Steven Spielberg’s film.
Unlike Schindler, she was arrested and tortured by the Gestapo. Unlike Schindler, who knew the people he helped, she risked her life for strangers.
Yet astonishingly, Irena lived in obscurity for decades and when she was finally acknowledged was presented as a bland icon, not nearly as interesting as the paradoxical Schindler.
It was really only in 1999, after four teenage girls from Kansas were assigned a school history project – to find out more about this rumoured heroine of the German occupation – that her story was uncovered.
The pupils tracked her down and wrote a play about her which they performed across America. Now it’s being made into a film, with Angelina Jolie mooted to star.
Belatedly, Irena received recognition including Poland’s highest honour. But inevitably, the American students’ portrait of Irena reflected their youthful naivety. Irena emerged into the international spotlight as a predictable female stereotype: a Madonna of the ghetto, a living saint.
Shortly after the students found her, Irena retreated to a care home, her world now shrunk to a high-backed chair and a table holding pill bottles, tissue boxes and faded photographs. She was admitted to hospital with heart problems on 6 May.
As the 98-year-old’s life ebbed away, her friends spoke to me. One summarised, ‘She was fully aware of the image she had created, but she couldn’t burst the bubble.’
Irena's daughter Janka
Couldn’t or wouldn’t? Like many of the war generation, she disliked talking about her experiences, deflecting questions about her motives and emotions.
Routinely described as a practising Roman Catholic, she was actually an agnostic with an unruly love life.
She emphasised the influence of her doctor father, who taught her ‘to help anybody in need’. But he had died, after catching typhus from patients, when she was seven. How much did Irena remember? How much was a potent family myth passed down by her bereaved mother?
Irena the idealist wanted to change the world. She was bossy. ‘She had a Margaret Thatcher personality,’ her close friend Elzbieta Ficowska suggested to me. It is an illuminating comparison, though Irena was left-wing, working in Warsaw’s welfare department by 1939, on the eve of war.
She was 29, beautiful, with a ‘fantastic will for life’. Her daughter Janka, 61, who lives in Warsaw, told me, ‘My father [Stefan Zgrzembski] met Mum before the war. I don’t know exactly what it was about her that fascinated him but somehow their love affair continued even though she married someone else.’
The someone else was Meiczyslaw Sendler, whom Irena was soon waving off to the front line.
Michal Glowinski, one of the Jewish children who was rescued
After German troops marched into the city that autumn, they began relocating the Jewish population to the ghetto, closing it a year later and trapping 400,000 people in squalor within its walls.
A quarter died from starvation and disease even before the deportation to concentration camps began.
But, fearful of typhus crossing into Aryan Warsaw, the occupiers allowed the social services department access to the ghetto, and Irena began using her pass to smuggle in medicine and food.
After joining one of the underground movements, she began to smuggle out children. She led a network of ten, nine of them women, one of whom died for her resistance activities.
They hid the children in coffins and body bags, led them through cellars and sewers; they sedated babies and carried them out in boxes. Irena placed infants with childless couples, and older children in temporary ‘foster’ homes where they learned Catholic rites before melting away into church orphanages and schools.
Michal Glowinski, 74, knew Irena from childhood as a friend of his Jewish family. She also saved his life by hiding him in an isolated convent. ‘She was an organisational genius. Though the youngest, she imposed her will on her colleagues, making quick decisions which no one questioned,’ he says.
Elzbieta Ficowska was smuggled out in a carpenter’s box at the age of six months, and re-homed with one of Irena’s closest colleagues. ‘I was 14 when I realised that my “father” had died in 1941, whereas I was born in 1942,’ she told me.
‘When I was 17, a friend said she’d heard I was Jewish. At that point, my Polish mum told me the truth, giving me a silver spoon engraved with my name and birth date, which my blood family had placed in the box with me.
‘I consider both my Polish mum and Irena to be a little pathological. It is a kind of insanity to overcome such fear. They were so alike, my mum and Irena – fantastic, strong women.’
She says her Polish mother was a keen gambler, which raises an intriguing idea: did the two women subliminally enjoy the ultimate gamble of risking their lives?
Irena at home in Poland, aged 91
Irena was charismatic enough to persuade hesitant Jewish parents to hand over their children to the care of gentiles.
Elzbieta has since heard that her Jewish family wept when they learned she was to be baptised. Later, though, they signalled their understanding by sending a white christening robe and a tiny gold cross through intermediaries.
For her part, Irena was determined to reunite children and birth parents when the war ended. She made two coded lists, recording the children’s fake and real identities, and buried these in glass jars in the garden of a friend.
One night in October 1943 – betrayed by a colleague under questioning, and by an inquisitive landlady – Irena was arrested by the Gestapo and taken to the notorious Pawiak prison.
Over a period of three months, she was tortured – the soles of her feet beaten repeatedly – but revealed nothing.
She escaped on the morning of her scheduled execution with the connivance of her guard, who had been bribed by the resistance. For the rest of the war, she lived as her rescued children lived – in hiding, under an assumed name.
Irena with Janka in 1949
This is the point, as peace arrives, where the film will doubtless cut away, slicing to the arrival of the American students five decades later. She would probably approve, preferring to draw a veil over the intervening years.
According to Michal Glowinski, ‘She had a tough life in her relationships. In the Polish biography about her, none of this is mentioned because Irena did not want it to be. The truth is, Irena, whose special skills saved lives, was not very good at making life happier for herself.’
Her daughter, Janka, filled me in. ‘The family legend has it that my mum went to a fortune teller who told her she would be married three times but only have two husbands, and that’s exactly what happened.’
Irena divorced Sendler and in 1947 married Stefan (by whom she had three children, Janka, Andrzej, who died in infancy, and Adam, who died of heart failure in adulthood).
Twelve years later, though, she divorced Stefan and remarried Sendler. That rematch also failed.
Janka said this marital turmoil left emotional ‘wounds’ and ‘melancholy’.
'A big problem with my dad was that he didn’t want her to work, and my mum was working 36 hours a day,’ Janka joked.
‘When I think of my childhood, I remember our housekeeper. Both my brother and I were hurt that [our mother’s] passion was saving the world, not us. But my brother never got over this, while I decided there was no purpose in scratching old scabs.’
Curiously, Irena smothered the two orphaned Jewish teenagers she took in after the war.
‘One stayed only a short time with us because she found my mother’s excessive care irritating. She said, “I had a mother, and no surrogate is going to foster me.’’’
Were Irena’s emotions warped by the war? Anna Mieszkowska is the author of her Polish biography. ‘Irena told me not to put this story in the book.
'She was asked to save two children, a boy and a girl. The parents wanted them to go but the grandparents did not. Irena arrived at their address and found the whole family had committed suicide – grandparents, parents, children. She had nightmares about this for many years.’
And Janka told me, ‘My mother never bought anything. She thought possessions were pointless because they would be destroyed if war came again, so it was my dad who had to buy books for us to read, plates for the kitchen.
‘I always warned Mum when a storm was forecast, because the thunder would upset her. The same with fireworks. It reminded her of shooting.
'She couldn’t sleep alone. She had to know someone was in her apartment. She was useless at everyday, normal things. In later years, I took this on. I took care of the “saint”.’
Elzbieta Ficowska, who was smuggled out of the Warsaw ghetto at
six months old
six months old
With age, Irena’s tiny frame seemed to collapse, eroded by osteoporosis. Her eyesight failing and unable to read newspapers, she somehow kept abreast of political developments.
She once fired off a letter to the American students in which she called George W Bush ‘a bastard’. Her translator was rather shocked that an elderly saint knew such language.
She was visited regularly not only by Janka but also by Elzbieta, whom she regarded as an honorary daughter (though the two ‘daughters’ had a prickly relationship).
Irena was ambiguous towards her belated lionisation. She craved acknowledgement for her resistance colleagues who were forgotten by history. She gleefully told friends she was treated ‘like the Queen of England’ when she returned from a trip to be honoured in Israel.
But she was only too aware that we prefer to view the Holocaust through the prism of stories such as hers with the satisfactory conclusion of rescue and hope.
Yet there were no clear-cut happy endings to Irena’s story, nor to the rescued children’s. Michal Glowinski told me: ‘You can survive the Shoah but you cannot escape its effects.’
Despite Irena’s efforts after the war – the disinterment of the glass jars with their coded information – few of the children were reunited with their parents. The gas chambers of Treblinka saw to that.
Consequently, many of the rescued have struggled with psychological problems and questions of identity. And as their parents once feared, these children are no longer Jewish.
‘I go to the synagogue from time to time as a kind of delegate of my lost family, but it’s alien to me,’ says Elzbieta Ficowska.
‘When I enter a Catholic church, everything is mine. Sometimes I look in the mirror for traces of my real parents. I sent letters all around the world to try to find out about them.’ She has never even seen a photograph.
Irena in a social welfare department truck in May 1948
Sitting with me on a sunny café terrace in May, snatching an interval from her vigil beside her mother’s bed, Janka concluded: ‘To me, my mother’s story shows that you are not aware what you are capable of – either for good or for bad – until a critical moment comes.’
Irena herself once summarised her story in a way that acknowledges both her public and private struggles: ‘I tried to live a human life, which isn’t always easy.’
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