A FANATIC is focused. Nothing extraneous to the mission is allowed to impinge on a fanatics consciousness or schedule.
Irena Sendler was a fanatic . . . for saving lives.
At great risk to her own.
Have you ever heard of the Pawiak prison in Warsaw? It was one of the Nazi torture chambers.
Sendler survived.
She was being led to her certain death.
But after you have almost singlehandedly created the network that saved some 2,500 children from certain extermination, you have a lot of friends.
True, each one of these friends is also at risk for torture and execution by the Nazis.
But no one risked her (or his) life more than Sendler.
The network was grateful.
Somehow, with starvation and constant killing all around, the members of the network put together a big enough bribe and risked their lives to get it to Sendlers executioner.
A few days later, for his own refusal to execute Sender, he himself was executed by his Nazi comrades.
Sendlers fanaticism was deeply rooted. In the 1930s, when the anti-Jewish measures in Poland began to cascade, Sendler did not acquiesce.
If Jews in a university class were segregated, she went to sit with them.
She recoiled from the way the anti-Semites treated the Jews. To her, it was not just distasteful, it was unbearable.
She was expelled from the university.
But not before she had acquired her competence as a nurse.
She played that competence acutely and astutely.
Not, of course, that the Nazis cared whether Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto died from typhus.
But she convinced the Nazis that measures needed to be taken to stop the typhus from spreading outside the ghetto. So the Nazis let her into the ghetto at will, to treat diseased people, lest there be a contagion, lest Germans themselves, outside the ghetto, die from the conditions inside the ghetto.
A perfect foil.
A perfect fanaticism: Every day for years, Irena Sendler entered the Warsaw Ghetto to help. . . . At first, she smuggled out a single baby or child in her small wagon.
Then, what to do with the child?
She needed to identify what we have come to call righteous gentiles to hide, feed and care for these children.
Eventually, she developed her network.
Oh, one more thing. The book on Irena Sendler is called Life in a Jar because she wrote down the name of each Jewish child she saved, and the names of their closest relatives, usually the parents. She then put these names in a jar and buried it under a tree in her backyard.
After the war, it would be necessary to inform these children of their Jewish heritage and, who knows, maybe reunite a few of them with their parents. How would that be possible if she did not preserve the names?
There was no conversionary motive in the life-saving work of this fanatic Catholic woman, Irena Sendler.
Fanaticism causes anguish. Exhibit A: Irena Sendlers mother was worried to death that her daughter was endangering herself, day in and day out. Sendler wasnt worried about that. But she was worried that if her activities were detected, she would endanger her mothers life. Thats how the Nazis worked: If you fought back, they killed not only you but . . . your mother . . . your bunkmates . . . your neighbors.
Sendlers worries for her mother did not stop her. That is what a fanatic is.
The worst part of the life-saving work was convincing the Jewish parents to give up their child, or children to a perfect stranger, no less.
The parents knew it was the right thing to do. But still, how is it possible? Just give up a child, just like that?
Of the many terrible stories in Life in a Jar, perhaps the worst is the time Sendler came to parents and asked them for their two young children.
The parents couldnt bear to part from them. After extensive pleading, Sendler convinced the parents to give up one child. The parents told her to come back the next day to get the other child. They could not give up both at once.
Sendler came back.
The building she came back to the very next day was empty of people, of furniture, of everything.
Had the parents given her both children at once, both would have been saved. But they couldnt do it.
Sendler (and the reader) is left to imagine what the parents thought as the Nazis came a few hours after they had given up one child, and as they were being led away to the Unschlagplatz, to the packed cattle car, to the gas chamber in Treblinka knowing they could have saved their precious, second child.
Sendler thought a lot how greatly she failed! She didnt hear of the Talmudic saying that whoever saves one Jewish life, it is as if one saved an entire world. As if was not good enough for her. She saw the arithmetic rather differently. She said: I saved 10 Jews today, but the Nazis succeeded in taking away 600 (or some such ugly ratio). She measured her work against the totality. She didnt see herself as a hero, but as a failure. Look at how many kids the Nazis got away with. Look how small my yield is by comparison.
This is the mind of a fanatic: Keep going back. Keeping passing by the Nazi guards, day in and day out, knowing youre deceiving them, knowing what theyll do if youre caught (as she once was, at the end, when she ended up in Pawiak).
Keep figuring out a way to increase your yield.
Keep at it, knowing that the enemy, the beast, is snatching away your prey day by day, sending it to certain death.
Years later, she defined her defiance of the Nazis and her fanaticism for saving Jewish children: My anger was stronger than my fear.
What happened to Irena Sendler when the Holocaust was over?
Worse than nothing.
Forget about gratitude, reward, recognition anything like that.
When Nazis in Poland died, Communism was born.
The Communists did not want to know about the rescue of Jews (or about the collaboration between Poles and Nazis). The Communists had no use for fanatic lovers of humanity. This meant that Irena Sendler, the fanatic for action, fell silent.
She did try, after the war, to locate the children. She did dig up the bottles containing the names. But the Communists made it impossible to communicate, to speak, to inquire. Despite her best efforts and golden intentions, she was able to contact very few of the 2,500 (!) Jewish children she saved.
AND this, my friends, is only half the story.
For after more than fifty-five years of anonymity, of silence, the story of Irena Sendler did come out.
In the most unlikely, unpredictable, way.
Those who rescued the rescuer were three teenage girls from Kansas, non-Jews, high school students, people who had never heard of the Holocaust, let alone Irena Sendler.
Each of these girls, in her own way, was suffering, one from her own mother coming down with cancer, one from being abandoned by her mother at age five, and one from extreme poverty.
Ever heard of Norman Conard? He was a history teacher at Uniontown High School in Uniontown, Kansas. He encouraged his students to participate in extracurricular projects for National History Day.
The rest, as they say, is history.
Somehow, he motivated these three girls, each carrying deep personal burdens.
But it was they who stumbled across a mention of Irena Sendler. Once they did, they had no idea how to proceed. This was gentile West Kansas! News of Poland, let alone of a specific person from that faraway place, hardly penetrated.
But one teenager, suddenly the mother of the house due to her mothers illness; another teenager, a bad student, always in trouble, long embittered by her abandonment by her mother; and still another teenager, a master at playacting so as to hide her poverty and shame they all began to search.
To learn.
Even, to travel.
To libraries in larger cities.
They began to write a play for National History Day, whose theme in 1999 was Turning Points in History.
Each of the teens played multiple roles. A emotional pivot of their play was when the one of them, playing Irena, attempted to persuade another one of them, playing a mother in the Warsaw Ghetto, to give up her baby.
Resonating in this scene for the high school actors, was, respectively, the prospect of a mother, like the ghetto mother, dying; the way another mother gave up her daughter; and the dont-know-where-the-next-meal-will-come-from poverty.
It became a powerful play.
It won the school competition.
It won the state competition.
It won the national competition! National champions from, of all places, Uniontown, Kansas, under the inspired leadership of Norman Conard.
This is only the beginning of the second half of the story.
Media paid attention to these girls play.
Civic leaders in Kansas paid attention.
Jewish communities in Kansas paid attention.
The girls had heard that Irena Sendler had a few surviving relatives.
They wrote to them, not knowing whether the addresses were correct. All this time, they had no clue that Irena Sendler was still alive.
Thats how anonymous in Poland she was.
Eventually these three girls ferreted her out.
Civic leaders stepped forward to pay for the girls to visit Irena Sendler in Poland!
From this meeting and from the performance of the play in Poland extensive media coverage of Irena Sendler began.
The girls school project made fanatics out of them. They performed this play far and wide far beyond 1999. They visited Irena Sendler twice more. Her heroism came out.
Who, pray tell, authored this book on the three girls who rescued the rescuer, Irene Sendler, from obscurity? Norman Conard? One of the three girls? Irena Sendlers family. No, no, and no.
One fine day in 2004, resting on the desk of a pediatrician in Middlebury, Vermont, who had never heard of Irena Sendler or Uniontown, Kansas, was a copy of the December, 2003 Ladies Home Journal. The doctor, Jack Mayer, did not subscribe to this magazine.
It contained an article, The Woman Who Loved Children, about Irena Sendler and the Kansas teens.
To this day, writes Dr. Mayer in Life in a Jar, I dont know who left that article for me to find, but it launched me on the journey that led to Life in a Jar: The Irena Sendler Project.
Who are you?
For more about Irena Sendler and about The Life in a Jar project, book, play and DVD, visit www.irenasendler.org
Copyright © 2011 by the Intermountain Jewish News
