Irena Sendler is known as the female Schindler especially in her homeland of Poland. Irena, along with a vast network of resistance members, are responsible for saving 2,500 children from Nazi occupied Warsaw during World War II. Irena’s father was a doctor who passed away when Irena was a child but not before instilling the importance of social work in his young daughter. While the timeline of their meeting is unclear Irena met a Jewish young man named Adam and fell in love sometime in her teens. Unfortunately her Catholic faith and his early betrothal to a (Jewish) family friend put a damper on their blossoming love story. The two married other people but remained friends and, shortly before WWII broke out, they rekindled their romance as adults.
“Gandhi, who once said, “A small body of determined spirits fired by an unquenchable faith in their mission can alter the course of history.” Such were Irena and all her friends, and this is their story.
Irena was an outspoken advocate for social reform on her college campus, she was even kicked out of her Master’s program for her beliefs and actions, and eventually found herself doing social work professionally. Unfortunately her husband would have preferred a wife who stayed home and had babies which lead to the couple separating, although they didn’t divorce. From 1935 to 1943 Irena worked for the Department of Social Welfare and Public Health of the City of Warsaw which gave her a pass to go in and out of the Warsaw Ghetto. She used this access to conduct clandestine subterfuge against the Nazis including smuggling Typhus vaccine inside the Ghetto and smuggling Jewish children out. Irena and her continually growing nexus kept lists of the children they rescued on scraps of cigarette paper but only Irena knew the names and locations of each child. When she was captured and tortured the whole network was at risk of collapsing but Irena withstood the torture and never shared the location of the list.
I enjoyed the approach Mazzeo took with this biography. There is no doubt that Irena and her friends, both the willing and the unwitting, were heroes who saves thousands of lives during the war but Irena is not written as an angel. Irena was blindly in love with a married Jewish man; she offered numerous times to use her connections to smuggle Adam out of the ghetto, offering to get his wife and mother out as well, but he always declined. While Irena’s pursuits were largely inspired by her love for children, and I believe her work would have continued even if Adam had allowed her to smuggle him into hiding somewhere, Mazzeo does not sugar coat her affair with a Adam as an equal contributor to her cause. For all her faults her moral compass is still a bit steadier than Schindler’s was and her results speak for themselves. Irena was a fascinating and flawed woman who should be given more recognition for her work.
