Planet Earth Peace Party

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On May 12, 2008 Irena Sendlerowa passed away in Warsaw Poland…She was 98 years old…

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Irena Sendlerowa was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize in 2007, but lost to Al Gore, former Vice President of the United States, and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

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During World War Two the nazis murdered 6.5 million Polish Citizens including 3.5 million Polish Jews…

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The Warsaw Ghetto was established by the German Governor-General Hans Frank on October 16, 1940. At this time, the population of the Ghetto was estimated to be 440,000 people, about 38% of the population of Warsaw. However, the size of the Ghetto was about 4.5% of the size of Warsaw. Nazis then closed off the Warsaw Ghetto from the outside world on November 16, 1940, building a wall with armed guards.

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Average food rations in 1941 for Jews in Warsaw were limited to 253 kcal, compared to 2,325 kcal for gentile Poles and 5,613 kcal for Germans.

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During World War II Irena Sendlerowa was an activist in the Polish Underground and the Żegota Polish anti-Holocaust resistance in Warsaw. She helped save 2,500 Jewish children from the Warsaw Ghetto by providing them false documents and sheltering them in individual and group children’s homes outside the Ghetto.

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As a member of Zegota, a secret organisation set up by the Polish government in exile in London in the second world war to rescue Polish Jews, Irena Sendlerowa organised a small group of social workers to smuggle the children to safety. She worked in the Warsaw health department and had permission to enter the ghetto, which had been set up in November 1940 to segregate the city’s 380,000 Jews. As an employee of the Social Welfare Department, she had a special permit to enter the Warsaw Ghetto, to check for signs of typhus, something the Nazis feared would spread beyond the ghetto….

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Irena Sendlerowa and her team smuggled the children out by variously hiding them in ambulances, taking them through the sewer pipes or other underground passageways, wheeling them out on a trolley in suitcases or boxes…Some were smuggled out in workmen’s toolbags…

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“Can you guarantee they will live?” Irena Sendlerowa recalls the distraught parents asking. But she could only guarantee they would die if they stayed. “In my dreams,” she says, “I still hear the cries when they left their parents.”

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Finding Christians to hide them was not easy: “There weren’t many Poles who wanted to help Jews, [even] children.” But Sendler organized a network of families and convents ready to give sanctuary. “I would write, ‘I have clothing for the convent’; a nun would come and pick up children.”

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Helping Jews was very risky — in German-occupied Poland, all household members were punished by death if a hidden Jew was found in their house…

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Irena Sendlerowa was arrested in October 1943 and taken to Gestapo headquarters where she was beaten. Her legs and feet were broken and she was then driven away to be executed. But a rucksack of dollars paid by Zegota secured her release. Underground colleagues bribed a guard to free her at the last minute and list her as “executed.” She was knocked unconscious and left by the roadside. She had to use crutches as a result of her injuries for the rest of her life… She continued her work from hiding. When the war ended, Irena Sendlerowa retrieved the bottles in which she’d hidden her index of names and began searching for the real parents. Few had survived.

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Irena Sendlerowa noted the names of the children on cigarette papers, twice for security, and sealed them in two glass bottles, which she buried in a colleague’s garden.After the war the bottles were dug up and the lists handed to Jewish representatives. Attempts were made to reunite the children with their families but most of them had perished in concentration camps.

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In the Year 2007 Irena Sendlerowa was honored at a special session in Poland’s upper house of parliament, members unanimously approved the resolution to honour Mrs Sendlerowa for rescuing “the most defenceless victims of the Nazi ideology - the Jewish children”. President Lech Kaczynski said she was a “great hero who can be justly named for the Nobel peace prize”.

He added: “She deserves great respect from our whole nation.”

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But Mrs Sendlerowa, who was living in a Warsaw nursing home at the time, insisted she did nothing special.

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In an interview she said: “I was brought up to believe that a person must be rescued when drowning, regardless of religion and nationality.”

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“The term ‘hero’ irritates me greatly. The opposite is true. I continue to have pangs of conscience that I did so little.”

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Irena Sendlerowa paid tribute to her co-workers…”My emotion is being shadowed by the fact that no one from the circle of my faithful coworkers, who constantly risked their lives, could live long enough to enjoy all the honors that now are falling upon me”….

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Irena Sendlerowa wanted the world to know that ten others were under her guidance in saving children from the Ghetto, and a number of others were helping outside the Ghetto. She lists the names of her underground liaison officers from the Children’s Section: Irena Schultz, Jadwiga Piotrowska, Janina Grabowska, Jadwiga Bilwin, Iza Kuczkowska, Wanda Drozdowska, Lucyna Franciszkiewicz, Stanisław Papuziński, Róża Zawadzka, and Jadwiga Deneka. “And a group of noble-minded people,” she adds.

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Irena had made false documents for people in the Warsaw area from 1939 to 1942, helping save many, BEFORE she joined the underground Zegota and started saving children.

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As early as 1939, when the Germans invaded Warsaw, Irena began helping Jews by offering them food and shelter.

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Irena first rescued the orphan children from inside the Ghetto.

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Irena used her papers as a Polish social worker and papers from one of the workers of the Contagious Disease Department (who was a member of the underground Zegota) to enter the Warsaw Ghetto. To show her solidarity with the Jewish people, she put on the mandatory Star of David armband on her right arm when entering the ghetto.

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Irena Sendlerowa was born Feb. 15, 1910, in Otwock, a small town southeast of Warsaw . She was an only child of parents who devoted much of their energies to helping workers. She was especially influenced by her father, a doctor who defied anti-Semites by treating sick Jews during outbreaks of typhoid fever. He died of the disease when Sendlerowa was 9…

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She studied at Warsaw University and was a social worker in Warsaw when the German occupation of Poland began in 1939. In 1940, after the Nazis herded Jews into the ghetto and built a wall separating it from the rest of the city, disease, especially typhoid, ran rampant. Social workers were not allowed inside the ghetto, but Sendlerowa, imagining “the horror of life behind the walls,” obtained fake identification and passed herself off as a nurse, allowed to bring in food, clothes and medicine.

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Irena Sendlerowa also resisted in other ways. When Irena Sendlerowa worked in the prison laundry, she and her co-workers made holes in the German soldiers’ underwear. When the officers discovered what they had done, they lined up all the women and shot every other one. It was just one of many close calls for Irena Sendlerowa…

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Irena Sendlerowa did not think of herself as a hero. She claimed no credit for her actions. “I could have done more,” she said. “This regret will follow me to my death.” She has been honored by international Jewish organizations - in 1965 she accorded the title of Righteous Among the Nations by the Yad Vashem organization in Jerusalem and in 1991 she was made an honorary citizen of Israel. Irena Sendlerowa was awarded Poland’s highest distinction, the Order of White Eagle, in Warsaw Monday Nov. 10, 2003, and she was announced as the 2003 winner of the Jan Karski award for Valor and Courage. She has officially been designated a national hero in Poland and schools are named in her honor. Annual Irena Sendler days are celebrated throughout Europe and the United States.

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During the 2007 Poland’s upper house of Parliament ceremony honoring Irena Sendlerowa, Elzbieta Ficowska, who was just six months old when she was saved by Irena Sendlerowa, read out a letter on her behalf: “Every child saved with my help is the justification of my existence on this Earth, and not a title to glory,” Irena Sendlerowa said in the letter, “Over a half-century has passed since the hell of the Holocaust, but its spectre still hangs over the world and doesn’t allow us to forget.”

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What do you think ?

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Putting aside the fact that Adolf Hitler and Josef Stalin were actual Nobel Peace Prize nominees….

It is somewhat mind boggling to comprehend the absurd logic in choosing Al Gore and the The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) over Irena Sendlerowa who at 98 yrs.old was still alive but confined to a nursing home in a wheelchair mainly to the Nazi torture she endured to protect the names of the children she had saved and her comrades…

The personal carbon footprint of Al Gore is quite large by any lifeform’s standards and ironically the awareness he created regarding climate change was done leaving huge carbon footprints all over Planet Earth….

The so-called Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and Al Gore Nobel Peace Prize efforts produced few if any actual implementable solutions and/or actions to combat climate change and reducing/eliminating the pollution and waste of mankind…

Irena Sendlerowa:(should have been the recipient of the)2007 Nobel Peace Prize

Sources of above information and recommended reading :

www.auschwitz.dk/Sendler.htm
news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/6448603.stm
www.guardian.co.uk/world/2007/mar/15/secondworldwar.poland
www.irenasendler.org/
www.usnews.com/usnews/culture/articles/940321/archive_012603_2.htm
www.irenasendler.org/facts.asp