Irena’s Children: A True Story of Courage

Author: Tilar J. Mazzeo

In 1942, Irena Sendler was granted access to the Warsaw ghetto as a young public health specialist. While she was there, she began to understand the fate that awaited the Jewish families who were unable to leave. Soon, she reached out to the trapped families, going from door to door and asking them to trust her with their young children. Driven to extreme measures and with the help of a network of local tradesmen, ghetto residents, and her star-crossed lover in the Jewish resistance, Irena ultimately smuggled thousands of children past the Nazis. She made dangerous trips through the city’s sewers, hid children in coffins, snuck them under overcoats at checkpoints, and slipped them through secret passages in abandoned buildings.

But Irena did something even more astonishing at immense personal risk: She kept a secret list buried in bottles under an old apple tree in a friend’s back garden. On it were the names and true identities of these Jewish children, recorded so their families could find them after the war. She could not know that more than 90 percent of their families would perish.

Paperback

352 pages