The True Catholic Response to the Shoah

by Fr. Roger J. Landry - May 30, 2008

Over the past 40 years, since Rolf Hochbuth, a communist, wrote his fictional 1963 play The Deputy in order to undermine Church authority with the calumny that Pope Pius XII was a pawn of Hitler and did nothing to try to save the Jews, the public storyline of the Church's work during those dark years has been, despite abundant evidence to the contrary, that the Catholic Church did little or nothing. The stories of heroic Catholic lay people, priests and nuns who risked everything to save Jews, has for the most part gone untold.

Such was the case with Catholic social worker Irena Sendler until 1999. That was the year when Kansas history teacher Norman Conard encouraged his high school freshmen to take up a year-long project for the National History Day program on the theme "He who changes one person changes the whole world." He gave four girls a 1994 magazine clipping mentioning an Irena Sendler, who the article stated saved 2,500 Jewish children from the Warsaw ghetto. Mr. Conard said that the number was likely a typographical error because he had never heard of her and someone who had done so much would surely be famous.

The girls got down to work. They scoured primary and secondary sources. They searched for an obituary and a final resting place. They discovered that the figure of 2,500 was, in fact, low, and that it referred solely to the number of children she rescued; she also had saved another 500 adults. They also found out that Irena Sendler was still alive in Warsaw and, with the help of a local Jewish businessman who had heard about their project, went to meet with her. They ended up writing a play about her life and began to perform it, first in their own school, then in surrounding schools, and then in places across the U.S. and in Poland. They entitled their work, "Life in Jar," in which they summarized all that Irena had done.

Their work — and Irena's life — were back in the news two weeks ago when Irena's obituary finally appeared following her May 12 death in Warsaw at the age of 98.

Born in 1910, Irena came from a devout and heroic Catholic family. Her parents taught her as a young girl we needed to risk our life for those in need. "If you see a person drowning," they instructed her, "you must jump into the water to save them, whether you can swim or not." In her childhood, she watched her father put this principle into action to the extreme. Scorning the anti-Semites in his community, he cared for Jews suffering with typhoid fever and inadequate medical care. He eventually caught the disease from them and died from it when Irena was just nine.

Twenty years later, soon after the Germans occupied Poland, Irena observed the Nazis move all the Warsaw-area Jews into a ghetto. Having received training as a social worker, she knew that disease would be rampant within the ghetto. Since the Germans prevented all those with her qualifications from entering the ghetto, she obtained fake identification and dressed as a garbage worker in order to smuggle in food, clothing and medication. At the same time she began to smuggle sick persons out, several hundreds of them, at the risk of her life. One of them ultimately became her husband.

When in 1942 the genocidal intentions of the Nazis were becoming apparent to her and to others, she formally joined the Polish underground, called Zegota, recruited ten of her closest friends, and then set out secretly to try to rescue from death as many Jewish children as possible. It was tremendously dangerous work and emotionally very trying. She first needed to persuade protective parents of the Nazis' intentions and get them to entrust their children to her and her friends. The parents, naturally, resisted. They begged her at least to guarantee their children's safety. Irena responded, simply, that she could not even assure them that she would make it out of the ghetto alive. If the children remained in the ghetto, however, she could guarantee that they would perish.

Having obtained the gut-wrenching permission of the parents, Irena and her friends would sedate the kids to keep them from crying and making noise and then smuggle them out in boxes, suitcases, sacks, body bags and coffins. Once outside the ghetto, they brought them to Catholic convents and orphanages or placed them in the homes of courageous and cooperative Polish Catholic families. The children were given non-Jewish aliases and documentation, but Irena recorded their real names and families on thin rolls of paper, placed them in jars, and buried them in a friend's garden, hoping, after the horrors were over, to restore them to their families. When the war was over and she tried, she discovered that almost all of their families had died in the ghetto or in the concentration camps.

In 1943 she was captured by the Nazis. They tortured her to divulge the names of her co-conspirators as well as the location of the bottles containing the names. When she refused, they broke her feet. When she continued to refuse, they broke her legs. It was clear that death awaited her. The pain, however, had made her pass out and when she awakened, she discovered that a Gestapo guard had received a handsome bribe from the Zegota to help her to escape. She did, and as soon as her bones healed, she was back at work with different disguises smuggling out other children.

Irena Sendler is now called the "female Oskar Schindler," although she saved twice as many lives as the German factory owner was able to get onto his famous lists.

When she gained notoriety as a hero because of "Life in a Jar," she resisted. "The term 'hero' irritates me greatly," she said in one of her last interviews. "The opposite is true. I continue to have pangs of conscience that I did so little." She tried to deflect the praise to the ten friends who helped her at the risk of their lives, all of whom had died. She was happy at least that their bravery would, thanks to the schoolgirls' efforts, never be forgotten. In a testimony to how well she had learned the lessons her parents taught her, she said, "Every child saved with my help is the justification of my existence on this earth and not a title to glory."

"He who changes one person changes the whole world." Irena's heroism changed the trajectory of nearly 3,000 lives, and that of their descendents. May her Christian example of putting out into the deep change our lives, too.

Father Roger J. Landry is pastor of St. Anthony of Padua in New Bedford, MA and Executive Editor of The Anchor, the weekly newspaper of the Diocese of Fall River.