American filmmaker Mary Skinner has made a wonderful documentary about the Polish humanitarian and heroine Irena Sendler, who was instrumental in saving more than 2,000 Jewish children during the Holocaust.
Irene Sendler during the war years
The movie, Irena Sendler: In the Name of Their Mothers, will be screened at Congregation Habonim on Sunday, Dec. 12 at 8 p.m. by the Polish-Jewish Heritage Foundation of Canada and the Young Polish Canadian Professionals Association.
Skinner will introduce her film and take questions after the screening.
The motion picture, the first of its kind on Sendler made outside Poland, recreates her mission of mercy and features interviews with her, several of the Jewish children she saved and two of Sendler’s fellow workers.
Like Jan Karski, the courageous Polish courier who told the world about conditions in the Warsaw Ghetto and the Nazi plan to exterminate the Jews of Poland, Sendler was an extraordinary person who risked life and limb to do good in a particularly dark period.
Sendler, a Catholic social worker, began to help Jews shortly after Germany invaded Poland in 1939. An employee of Warsaw’s social welfare department, an organization administered by the Nazis, she helped Jews to Polonize their names so that they would be eligible for assistance.
After visiting the Warsaw Ghetto and witnessing the “hellish” conditions there, she formed a network to smuggle Jewish children out of the ghetto to convents and orphanages. She was assisted by Jewish police officers and tram drivers, among others.
Sendler continued with her work despite a decree by the Nazis in 1941 that helping Jews was punishable by death.
Sendler’s determination was forged on the anvil of compassion. She was deeply affected by the liquidation of Janos Korczak’s Jewish orphanage in Warsaw.
Animated by remarkable archival footage of wartime Warsaw, the film is supplemented by interviews with four of the Jewish children whose lives were saved by Sendler and her co-workers.
Once the children were removed from the ghetto, they were placed in safe houses and provided with a stable environment.
“We had to give them a lot of love,” says Sendler, explaining that the children were often terrified and confused.
Having been rescued, the children were given fake identity papers and new names and baptismal certificates and taught how to recite Catholic prayers.
Not surprisingly, some Jewish parents were reluctant to hand over their children to Sendler, fearing for their safety.
At the end of 1942, when Sendler ran out of money, she turned to the Council to Aid Jews, known as Zegota. But after the 1943 Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, she could no longer help Jews, and this weighed on her conscience, she says.
She did, however, send the Jewish children in her care to more than 200 convents in rural Poland. Even there, children with obvious Jewish features were in danger because of German inspection visits.
Sendler was arrested and tortured by the Gestapo in 1943. Due to be executed, she was saved by the Polish underground at the very last moment.
Although she lived in hiding for the remainder of the German occupation, she continued her work, burying lists of Jewish children in jars so that they could be reunited with their parents after the war. Regrettably, only a very small proportion ever saw their parents again. They had been murdered in the Treblinka extermination camp.
During the Communist postwar era in Poland, Sendler was harassed by the Polish government, having been accused of maintaining relations with the non-Communist Polish government-in-exile in Britain.
Yet Sendler’s heroics did not go unrecognized. In 1965, she was named a Righteous Gentile by Yad Vashem, one of some 6,000 Poles who were so honoured.
In the Name of Their Mothers pays tribute to Sendler and her brave band of decent Poles who, under the most difficult circumstances, rose to the occasion when they were most needed.
