Summary and Analysis of Irena's Children: The Extraordinary Story of the Woman Who Saved 2,500 Children from the Warsaw Ghetto

Based on the Book by Tilar J. Mazzeo

Worth Books

• Publisher: Worth Books
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN: 9781504019415
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Historical Biographies
• Index: History

So much to read, so little time? This brief overview of Irena's Children tells you what you need to know—before or after you read Tilar J. Mazzeo's book.
Crafted and edited with care, Worth Books set the standard for quality and give you the tools you need to be a well-informed reader.
 
This short summary and analysis of Irena's Children includes:

• Historical context
• Chapter-by-chapter overviews
• Profiles of the main characters
• Detailed timeline of key events
• Important quotes
• Glossary of terms
• Supporting material to enhance your understanding of the original work

About Irena's Children: The Extraordinary Story of the Woman Who Saved 2,500 Children from the Warsaw Ghetto by Tilar J. Mazzeo:
 
Despite great risks, Irena Sendler, known as the female Oskar Schindler, rescued approximately 2,500 Jewish children from the Warsaw Ghetto—and death.
 
Using a secret underground network to place children in foster families and Catholic orphanages, and providing them with new identities through forged paperwork, Irena was able to smuggle the children out of the ghetto and past the Nazis. She was eventually caught and tortured, and the men and women who worked with her risked the same fate every day.
 
Irena's Children is the incredible story of a brave woman who would do anything to save the lives of innocent children during the world's bleakest times.
 
The summary and analysis in this ebook are intended to complement your reading experience and bring you closer to a great work of nonfiction.
 

Summary

Prologue

Author Tilar J. Mazzeo begins her story of Irena Sendler in the middle: with the Nazi’s arrest of the young woman in 1943. It is a scene of enormous drama and tension, highlighting the terrifying consequences resistance work could bring. It also vividly demonstrates Irena’s courage, the quick-thinking of all of those in her resistance group, and the extraordinary bravery of everyone involved. When the Gestapo agents burst into the Sendler apartment in the middle of the night, it was only a combination of luck and wiles that prevented them from discovering the Jews hiding there, or the lists of rescued children Irena had been keeping.

The chapter closes with Irena’s arrival at Aleja Szucha, Gestapo headquarters in Warsaw, Poland, and her terrifying discovery that she still had one incriminating cigarette paper with an address on it in her possession.

Need to Know: Although this is a work of carefully researched nonfiction, Mazzeo uses a writing technique often employed in fiction and film: plunging the reader immediately into a moment of high drama. She establishes what’s at stake for the individuals the reader will come to know, and so there is a sense of foreboding in the earlier, less intense periods of Irena Sendler’s life—it’s clear where things are heading.

Mazzeo uses this writing style for the entire book, creating a sense of immediacy for events that took place decades ago, and bringing historical characters vividly to life.

Chapter 1: Becoming Irena Sendler

Otwock, 1910–1932

Otwock, the village southeast of Warsaw in Poland, was well known for its long established Hasidic Jewish community and for the world-renowned spa and clinic created by Dr. Józef Marian Geisler in the late 1800s to treat patients with tuberculosis. It was also the place where Irena Sendler, then Irena Stanisława Krzyżanowska, grew up as the wealthy daughter of a compassionate Catholic doctor who treated many of the village’s poor Jews when other physicians refused to do so. Her father’s belief in helping anyone who needed it, regardless of race or religion, greatly influenced Irena, as did his membership in the Polish Socialist Party that advocated fair access to healthcare for all, an eight-hour workday, and the end to child labor.

Anti-Semitism was strong in Poland, but Irena’s father did not embrace it. Many of her playmates were Jewish children and she was familiar with their Yiddish language and religious and cultural traditions. And although Irena’s family was wealthy, she witnessed a great deal of poverty by accompanying her father when he made his rounds to see Jewish patients.

When a typhoid epidemic hit Otwock in 1916, Irena’s father contracted it a year later and he died five before Irena’s 7th birthday. His death left Irena and her mother, Janina, impoverished. However, the Jewish community did not forget how her father had opened his doors to them when no one else would, and they offered to pay for Irena’s education. Her mother’s pride would not allow her to accept, so they moved to Piotrków, a town not far from Warsaw. There, Irena met her future husband, Mietek Sendler, whom she would marry after attending the University of Warsaw, where she trained to be a social worker.

Need to Know: Irena’s father had been such a vocal activist in his younger days that he was expelled from two different medical schools for leading strikes and protests. As Irena became more involved in the underground resistance efforts, she realized she was similar to her father in many ways, despite having lost him when she was quite young.

The town of Piotrków was a center for left-wing politics and nationalism. When Irena joined the Girl Scouts there, she and the other girls learned not only the usual songs and crafts but were also drilled in tactics for defending Poland from the potential invaders on their borders: the Russians and the Germans.

Irena developed misgivings about Mietek; she worried about giving up the freedom of single life, and about what she began to see as their philosophical differences. Despite her reservations, she married him when she was 21 years old, just before graduation. She felt it was her duty to keep her promise and also saw her marriage as a way to help her mother by no longer being a financial burden.

Chapter 2: Dr. Radlińska’s Girls

1935–1940

Irena’s determination to fight anti-Semitism was apparent during the riots at the University of Warsaw, triggered by the institution of the “bench ghetto”: separate seating for the Jewish students. When Irena sat with the Jewish students in their segregated section, she was beaten by anti-Semitic gangs. But she didn’t back down.

During her time at the University of Warsaw, Irena was accepted into an internship across town at the Polish Free University. It was there that she came under the influence of Dr. Helena Radlińska, founder of what was then a groundbreaking orphanage school, and running charitable clinics that provided classes for the unemployed and services for the impoverished. Dr. Radlińska was worshiped by many young students as a pioneer in the field of social work in Poland. One of the factors that perhaps bonded Irena so closely to her professor was that Helena Radlińska had known Irena’s father—her ex-husband was a doctor who had worked with him. Helena was also one of the founding members with him of the Polish Socialist Party, an organization Irena also later joined.

Under Radlińska’s tutelage, Irena blossomed intellectually and developed a sense of purpose in her life. She continued to protest anti-Semitism, scratching off the word “Aryan” from her campus identity card. Her actions ultimately led to her suspension from college. With Dr. Radlińska’s help she found a full-time job with an organization helping unwed mothers.

Irena’s husband, Mietek, pressed her to have children, but Irena was not interested. She preferred the company of her fellow university students—and especially Jewish law student Adam Celnikier—who, like her, were politically active and determined to fight against injustice. Irena grew bored in her marriage and the pace of ordinary life; when Mietek accepted a job in a town several hours away, Irena did not join him.

Then, on September 1, 1939, the Germans began air strikes on Warsaw. “Radlińska’s girls” immediately went into action, strategizing plans to help those wounded and suffering in all the destruction.

Need to Know: Dr. Helena Radlińska, a Jewish professor who had converted to Catholicism, was a marked woman by the Nazis, and eventually went into hiding at a convent. But that did not stop her from counseling and directing Irena and her group of comrades in their efforts to save Jewish children from death at the hands of the Nazis.

Social work was a relatively new field in Poland, and the programs Radlińska and her colleagues developed became models for much of modern social work agencies and departments today.

Chapter 3: Those Walls of Shame

Warsaw, 1941–1942

Poland surrendered to Hitler’s forces on September 27, 1939. In 1940, the Nazis cordoned off a sixteen-block area of Warsaw and ordered all the Jews in the city to move there, separating them from the “Aryan” side. The area had been badly damaged in the bombings and prices for apartments there skyrocketed, as wealthy Jews jockeyed for better living conditions.

The section became known as the Warsaw ghetto. At first, many Jews thought they would actually be safer there, among fellow Jews and where the Germans and their anti-Semitic Polish neighbors wouldn’t bother them. They had no idea they were going to be walled in, and that the restrictions would become untenable. Jews were given rations for a mere 180 to 300 calories a day to live on and were barred from receiving any social services or assistance. Dr. Radlińska suggested that Irena create a mirror social services network in order to provide Jews living behind the walls of the ghetto with medicine and food. What began as a small effort blossomed into a resistance cell that included hundreds of people from ten different offices and institutions.

This underground effort to ferry life-sustaining assistance to over 400,000 Jews living behind the wall required forging statistics, making up names, and creating fictitious families. They were able to thwart the Germans from checking up on them by adding reports about infectious diseases, such as typhus, tuberculosis, and cholera, taking advantage of the Germans’ aversion to illness.

Once the Germans took control of Warsaw, they began a systematic effort to rid the world of Jews. They accomplished this in increments, first by closing synagogues and banning Jews from receiving social services, then by adding barbed wire and broken glass to the walls to keep ghetto residents from escaping, and shooting anyone who attempted to transport children out, including the children themselves. Preparations for “the final solution” had begun.

Using her position as a public health specialist, Irena obtained an epidemic control pass that enabled her to move in and out of the ghetto freely, allowing her to stay in contact with the resistance workers there and also to continue to see Adam Celnikier, who by now was her lover. She began to wear the Star of David that Jews were required to display, partly in solidarity, but also so that she and Adam could be seen in public together as a couple, as “interracial” dating was now illegal.

Need to Know: Prior to Germany invading Poland in 1939, plans were in the works in Berlin to make Poland the dumping ground of Jews and other “subhumans.” The Warsaw ghetto was part of this plan to contain Jews, not only from Poland but from the other European countries that the Germans now occupied.

The Jewish quarter, as the ghetto was also known, was originally intended to house 80,000 residents. Over time, the numbers swelled to 400,000.

After three years of petitioning the university, Irena was able to resume her studies at the University of Warsaw.

Chapter 4: The Youth Circle

Warsaw, 1940–1941

Irena and three friends from her university days, Irka Schultz, Jadwiga Deneka, and ...

Table of contents

• Title
• Disclaimer
• Contents
• Context
• Overview
• Summary
• Timeline
• Cast of Characters
• Direct Quotes and Analysis
• What’s That Word?
• Critical Response
• About Tilar J. Mazzeo
• For Your Information
• Bibliography
• Copyright