On This Day in History: October 18

Irena Sendler smuggles Jewish children out of the Warsaw Ghetto

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Half of all Jewish people who died in the Holocaust were Polish. The fucking Nazis exterminated 90% of the Jewish population in that nation, and it would have been higher were it not for the courage of people like Irena Sendler, who risked her life to smuggle thousands of Jewish children out of the Warsaw ghetto and hide them from their would-be killers.

--On This Day in History, Shit Went Down: October 18, 1943--

Prior to the fucking Nazis invading her country, Sendler was a social worker and nurse in Warsaw. The fucking Nazis removed all the Jewish staff from the Social Welfare Department where she worked and forbade the remaining staff from providing any assistance to Jewish people. Irena muttered under her breath “Like fuck I won’t.” Probably.

Nearly 400,000 Jews were crowded into the Warsaw ghetto, and Sendler said to the fucking Nazis hey typhus is probably gonna break out there and spread to the troops so can I conduct inspections and they said yeah I guess. So she snuck in medication, food, clothing, and other necessities. She also helped smuggle 2,500 Jewish children out of the ghetto, rescuing them from certain death. She did this despite the fact that giving any aid to Jews was punishable by execution.

She didn’t do it all alone. There were others involved, but Sendler was leader of the efforts to remove babies and small children from the Warsaw ghetto and hide them with willing families, orphanages, and Catholic convents. She also kept lists of who was who to aid in reuniting these children with their parents if they survived the war. Except damn few did, because the fucking Nazis emptied the ghetto in the summer of 1942 to be exterminated in the Treblinka death camp.

The children were given Christian names and taught Christian prayers to hide them from the fucking Nazis, but they were almost discovered on October 18, 1943, when the fucking Gestapo, who had come to suspect Sendler as guilty of the horrible crime of being a humanitarian, raided her house. While the fucking Nazis searched her home, she tossed the lists to her friend who hid them inside her clothes. Sendler was arrested and repeatedly tortured for information, but never betrayed her comrades or the children they’d rescued. Sendler was scheduled to be executed, but the guards escorting her to her death were bribed by the Polish Resistance and they let her go.

Sendler was forced into hiding, and worked as a nurse in a field hospital during the failed Warsaw Uprising in the summer of 1944. After the war, she continued to work for social causes and received numerous humanitarian accolades. Irena Sendler died in 2008 at the age of 98.

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