"When Holocaust rescuer Irena Sendler died last year at the age of 98, Rabbi Jacques Cukierkorn of Kansas City’s New Reform Temple took issue with various obituaries paying tribute to her as the “female Oskar Schindler.” Schindler, he said, “should be called the male Irena Sendler, given that she saved many more Jews than Schindler.”
"It’s true — more than 2,500 children of the Warsaw Ghetto owed their lives to a Polish Catholic social worker who worked wonders right under the Nazis’ less-than-diligent gaze.
If you attended the play “Life in a Jar,” which dramatized Sendler’s career as a rescuer, then you are familiar with her remarkable story. You also may be aware of the story behind “Life in a Jar” itself: In 1999, for a National History Day project, a group of students in rural Kansas were given a challenge by their teacher, Norman Conard.
Conard produced a magazine article he’d clipped at the time that “Schindler’s List” was wowing moviegoers. The article claimed that there was a virtually unknown woman living in Poland who, half a century earlier, had rescued 2,500 Jews from the Nazis.
Surely that was a typo, said Conard, as though daring his kids to prove him wrong.
The students not only verified Sendler’s breathtaking accomplishment, they singlehandedly revived her story with a play, which has been performed hundreds of times around the world.
And now there’s a movie.
Anna Paquin stars in “The Courageous Heart of Irena Sendler,” airing at 8 tonight on KCTV-5 as the 236th presentation of the “Hallmark Hall of Fame.” It’s a straightforward and earnest account, adapted from the book by Anna Mieszkowska, of an unfailingly moral and caring person who spirited hundreds, then thousands of children across Nazi checkpoints into the waiting arms of Catholic families.
Honored for two decades after World War II, Sendler eventually slipped into obscurity, perhaps a result of her own humility. After the Kansas kids rediscovered her, Cukierkorn went to visit Sendler in 2004. He recalled her telling him to bring cookies — not for herself (she had diabetes) but to share with others at the nursing home where she lived.
Nor was Sendler one to burnish her own legend. When asked if she had advice for the young people dramatizing her story, she told them to “always end your performance by saying the real heroes of the story were the Jewish parents and grandparents.” After all, they had willingly surrendered their children to her. They were ensuring that their offspring would live, but in so doing they relinquished one of the last joys they had in that doomed community of Warsaw."
When I found out Irena Sendler was passed over for the Nobel Peace Prize, and it was given to Al Gore...I couldn't believe it. Well, not at first. After all, spreading propaganda about unproven theories on "climate change" is surely more important than risking your life to save the lives of over 2,500 Jewish children. And they wonder why newspapers are going out of business. I wonder if Al would still travel around in his jet if they broke both his legs and feet like they did Irena's?Al should read 2 Peter 3 if if wants to know the truth about "global warming."...keith 1 Cor 13
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