In a world where the population is approximately 7.4 billion people, and approximately 50% of those people are female, there are a lot of stories that have gone untold. This cache series recognizes some amazing women and girls, and highlights their contributions to our planet...some large, some small, but all very important. Do you know all of these Mighty Girls? I hope that someone in this series is a new name to you, and that you will help to share these stories, and many more! I also look forward to hearing your own Mighty Girl stories!
A Mighty Girl 3: Irena Sendler
Irena Sendler might be an unknown to you. She was to me, until about three years ago! Irena Sendler (or, Irena Sendlerowa) was born in Poland in 1910. Irena’s father was a doctor who died in the typhus epidemic of 1917 while helping care for poor Jewish people in his region. Irena’s community helped her mother to pay for her education, where she trained mainly as a social worker...but, as you can imagine, working as a social worker involved many medical contacts, and she spent much of the time between 1939-1943 (World War II) working with the Contagious Disease Department. Her main work was with Jewish people who were facing severe persecution.
After the Warsaw Ghetto was erected in 1940, when Irena could no longer help isolated Jews, she began to work to save the children in the Ghetto. Irena, working with others in a resistance group, is credited with having saved 2,500 children and infants by smuggling them out of the ghetto to adoptive and foster families. Irena kept careful records of who the children were and where they were placed and saved those records in jars that she buried. Then, after the war, she used these records and did her best to reunite the children with immediate or extended families (though, sadly, this was mostly impossible, due to the loss of most families to Nazi death camps). Irena was arrested in 1943, imprisoned, and tortured. She kept her secrets and escaped, thanks to bribery, but was on the run for the remainder of the war.
Irena Sendler was announced as the 2003 winner of the Jan Karski award for Valor and Courage. She has been recognised by the State of Israel with the honour of Righteous among the Nations. Late in life, she was also awarded the Order of the White Eagle (Poland), Poland's highest honor, for her wartime humanitarian efforts. Irena Sendler passed away in May of 2008, at the age of 98. She is remembered as one of the most dedicated and active workers who aided Jews during the Nazi occupation of Poland.