Irena Sendler, when asked about the thousands of Jewish children she had saved during the Second World War, said "I was no hero. I just did a regular thing."
This is a common sentiment of rescuers. In many ways, they are absolutely right. Almost all of us feel a calling to stand up for what we know is right. The problem is that we do not act on these callings. As inspirational speaker Jim Rohn said "the few who do are the envy of the many who only watch."
The fact of the matter is that greatness is within the grasp of all of us. We just need to take the necessary actions to bring it about. Perhaps by studying the actions of Sendler we too can hear the voice that speaks inside of us and do the regular things that will make a positive difference in the world.
Sendler was a member of the Polish underground and a nurse living in Warsaw.The Nazis had forced all Jews living in the city to live in a horribly crowded, dirty and walled off ghetto without enough food or medicine. They were terrified of the diseases like typhus that could spread to the general population, and Sendler was hired by the Social Welfare Department to take measures to prevent such an outbreak. She used her position of trust to smuggle children out of the ghetto.
Working with a group of other women involved in the underground, they smuggled roughly 2,500 children to safety, using whatever means was necessary, even if it meant using the sewer system or hiding children in packages.
The children were given new names and hidden in Catholic orphanages, boarding schools and with families. The real names of the children were placed in jars and buried, only to be dug up when the Nazis had left Poland.
It is significant to note that at one point Sendler was discovered by the Nazis and severely tortured, but she never betrayed her collaborators or the children. In the end, her life was miraculously spared.
After the war, Sendler spent most of her life living in relative obscurity in Poland. Though she was awarded the prestigious Righteous Among The Nations award by Israel in 1965, Israel was not on good terms with the Communist government in Poland, and little was made of her accomplishments until well after the Cold War ended.
Finally, in 1999, a high school in a small town in Kansas made a play about Sendler's courageous work called Life In A Jar. After this, Sendler received a number of awards and was even nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize in 2007. The play inspired the film A Courageous Heart, which came out in 2009, one year after Sendler's death.
It is interesting to note that Sendler lived in obscurity for most of her life and died in relative poverty. Even a number of child survivors of the Warsaw ghetto only found out about her shortly before her death. They visited her and tried to make her life more comfortable, but one of the survivors, Vancouver author and teacher Lillian Boraks-Nemetz, noted to me that, "She was very poor but only financially, not in spirit."
There is a peace that comes in taking the courage to act, in knowing that we did not turn away. This was something that torture, obscurity and poverty could never take away from Sendler. It is also something that is available to every one of us. We can all be heroes. We can all be rescuers. By studying the lives of people like Irena Sendler, we come to recognize this truth, and as more and more of us embrace it, we bring the world to a brighter future than we can even imagine.
