Irena Sendler

She first got married in 1931 to Mieczysław Sendler. However, the couple divorced in 1947.

Her second marriage was to Stefan Zgrzembski, a Jewish friend from her university days. She gave birth to three children during this marriage. This marriage too ended in divorce in 1959. Eventually she remarried her first husband, Mieczysław Sendler.

Irena Sendler lived a long life, and spent her last years in Warsaw. She died on 12 May 2008, aged 98, and is buried in Warsaw's Powązki Cemetery.

She was born as Irena Krzyżanowska on 15 February 1910 in Otwock, near Warsaw, to Stanisław Krzyżanowski and his wife Janina. She was the only child of her parents.

Her father was a physician and also one of the first Polish Socialists. She was greatly influenced by his selfless service to the patients, most of whom were Jewish and poor. Her father contracted typhus while treating Jewish patients the other doctors had refused to treat and died in February 1917.

Irena studied Polish literature at Warsaw University, and joined the Polish Socialist Party. She was a courageous girl and openly protested against the ghetto-bench system that existed at some prewar Polish universities. Due to this she was suspended from the University of Warsaw for three years.

During the late 1930s Irena Sendler moved to Warsaw and started working for the municipal Social Welfare departments. The Germans invaded Poland in 1939 and the Nazis started brutalizing the citizens, especially the Jewish population.

She was working as a Senior Administrator in the Warsaw Social Welfare Department at that time. The department operated canteens all over the city and provided meals and other necessities to the orphans, elderly, and the poor.

Irena Sendler realized the pathetic situation of the Jews under the Nazis and helped the Jews by registering them under fictitious Christian names and reported the Jewish families as being afflicted with highly infectious diseases in order to prevent inspections.

She was taking a huge risk by helping the Jews as giving any kind of assistance to Jews in German-occupied Poland was punishable by death. Yet she courageously continued her services to the Jews.

The Zegota, an underground organization also known as the Council to Aid Jews, selected her to head its Jewish children’s section in 1943. During this time, she was assigned the name of ‘Jolanta’ in order to protect her real identity.

Irena Sendler is best remembered for the pivotal role she played in saving the lives of approximately 2,500 Jewish children during the Holocaust in which most of the parents ultimately perished. She smuggled them out of the Warsaw Ghetto and helped in finding them homes with non-Jewish families, an act for which she later received widespread recognition.