LiViNg PeAcE

I now have in mind something a little different. It is only different in the fact that the previous people were nonviolent peace activists. Irena Sendler was also part of a peace movement, in my opinion, but she wasn’t just singing and believing, she was rescuing children.
When Germany invaded Warsaw in 1939, Irena was a nurse in a hospital in Warsaw. When she saw what the ghetto was doing, she knew she had to do something. She started trying to convince mothers to give their children to her so she could try to get them out of the ghetto. She knew it was hard to give a child away, so she gave them time. Sometimes, when she came back to ask if they had made up their mind, she would find out that they had been sent to concentration camps, from were she was sure they would never come back. When she did get kids from families, she would take them out on ambulances and said they had Tifus, which was a very feared disease back then. After a while she started using whatever was available to rescue these children. She used garbage cans, cardboard boxes, coffins and anything that would help. She knew the kids were still in danger once outside the ghetto, so she made each and everyone of them false identifications with different names. She wanted to be able to give these kids what they once had, so she kept their real identifications and buried them in her neighbor’s backyard. She was caught. The nazis found out what she was up to and was taken to jail. There, she was awfully tortured. She bared all the tortures and never gave out the location of the true identities of the children. Because of this, she was put to death penalty. The day she was supposed to serve it, a soldier allowed her to escape.  After the nazis left, she got the identifications back and tried to return every child she could to their original home. She saved more than  2,500 kids. 

Yesterday, May 12th, with 98 years of age, Irena Sendler passed away. Until last minute, she still got visits from the kids she had once saved or their children. When asked what she felt about what she did, her roesponse was, “I could have done more, and that remorse is going to follow me until the day I die.” She made a huge impact on the life of thousands of people. Irena Sendler will be remembered in history as the “Angel of the ghetto in Warsaw” for her bravery and kindness.

“Mother of the children of the Holocaust.”
 

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