Her name should have been so much more well known before now. It should be far more well known than likely it will be now that she has died. IRENA SENDLER. "Save a life, save a world" is, I think, a saying from the Talamud. Oskar Schindler saved about 1100 to 1200 people from the holocaust and rightly is lauded in memorials and movies. Irene Sendler, who just died at 98, saved about 2,500 many of them children, from the Warsaw Ghetto, as it and its people were being destroyed by the Nazis and so many were sent to their deaths by gun or gas chamber.
Schindler was what is described as an "indifferent" Catholic, and an unlikely hero because of his lifestyle. Sendler was, so far as I can tell, a quiet believer. She was acknowledged by a grateful Jewish community in 1965 as a Righteous Gentile. But mostly she had been obscure. Why would that be? Anyone who does what Schindler did, what she did, should have his and her name repeated, shouted and repeated. And she did not do it alone. She had the help of 30 people, even more anonymous than she has been since the Second World War.
I feel as if it is a duty to put her name out there, one more time, as if this little blog could make any difference at all. But then, who knows what makes a difference? She deserves our honor. She is a saint, really, in the truest sense, an ordinary person who did the extraordinary and felt satisfaction in the doing of it and the saving of people she did not even know. You see, she was captured, and she was tortured, but she too, in another extraordinary moment, escaped to live to a ripe old age and stand as a model for all of us.
The light of holiness emanated from her face, then, and only recently.
1 comment:
Maybe one blog cannot make a huge difference- but it is a start. I have been researching her since I very recently heard heer name. I only wish more people could see the play "Life In A Jar". Maybe they should have played a video of it before the new Batman movie. I am sad that more people know who the American Idol was, but have never, and may not ever, know of Irena Sendler, and those like her. As a parent and teacher, I plan to make her known to those around me. Now, when I search my head and heart for an example of love, faith, courage and strength, I will have the name "Irena Sendler" on my lips.
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