Lembram-se daquela mensagem em que o Duarte, para alem de nos avisar do Angelus, nos aconselhou a descobrir mais sobre a Irena Sendler?
Decidi fazer isso e fiquei encantada com esta velhinha!
Leiam!
Irena Sendler (in
Polish also: Irena Sendlerowa; de domo Krzyżanowska;
February 15,
1910 –
May 12,
2008)
[1] was a
Polish social worker. During
World War II she was an activist in the
Polish Underground and the
Żegota Polish anti-Holocaust resistance in
Warsaw. She helped save 2,500 Jewish children from the
Warsaw Ghetto by providing them with false documents and sheltering them in individual and group children's homes outside the
Ghetto.
During the
World War II German occupation of
Poland, Sendler lived in Warsaw (before that she lived in
Tarczyn) while working for the city's Social Welfare Department. Under the pretext of conducting inspections of sanitary conditions during a typhoid outbreak, Sendler visited the ghetto and smuggled out babies and small children in ambulances and trams, sometimes disguising them as packages.
[3] She also used the old courthouse of the edge of the Warsaw Ghetto (still standing) as one of the main routes of smuggling children out. She started helping Jews a long time before the
Warsaw Ghetto was established. As early as 1939, when the Germans invaded Poland, she began helping Jews by offering them food and shelter. Irena and her helpers made over 3,000 false documents to help Jewish families, before she joined
Zegota and the children's division. Helping Jews was very risky — in
German-occupied Poland, all household members were punished by death if a hidden Jew was found in their house. This punishment was more severe than those applied in other occupied European countries.
In December 1942, the newly created
Children's Section of the Żegota (Council for Aid to Jews), nominated her (under her cover name Jolanta
[4]) to head its children's department. As an employee of the Social Welfare Department, she had a special permit to enter the Warsaw Ghetto, to check for signs of typhus, something the Nazis feared would spread beyond the ghetto.
[5] During the visits, she wore a
Star of David as a sign of solidarity with the Jewish people and so as not to call attention to herself.
She cooperated with the Children's Section of the Municipal Administration, linked with the RGO (Central Welfare Council), a Polish Relief Organization tolerated under German supervision. She organized the smuggling of Jewish children from the Ghetto, carrying them out in boxes, suitcases and trolleys.
[2] The children were placed with Polish families, the Warsaw orphanage of the Sisters of the Family of Mary or
Roman Catholic convents such as the Sisters Little Servants of the Immaculate Conception of the Blessed Mary
[6] at
Turkowice and
Chotomów. Some were smuggled to priests in parish rectories where they could be further hidden. She hid lists of their names in jars, in order to keep track of their original and new identities. Zegota assured the children that, when the war was over, they must be returned to Jewish relatives.
[1]In 1943, Sendler was arrested by the
Gestapo, severely tortured, and sentenced to death. Żegota saved her by bribing the German guards on the way to her execution. She was left in the woods, unconscious and with broken arms and legs.
[2] She was listed on public bulletin boards as among those executed. For the remainder of the war, she lived in hiding, but continued her work for the Jewish children. After the war, she dug up the jars containing the children's identities and began an attempt to find the children and return them to living parents. However, almost all the children's parents had died at the
Treblinka extermination camp.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irena_Sendler
