Irena's Children

The Extraordinary Story of the Woman Who Saved 2,500 Children from the Warsaw Ghetto

Tilar J. Mazzeo

• Publisher: Gallery Books
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN:
  9781476778518
• eBook ISBN:
  9781476778525
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Historical Biographies
• Index: History

From the New York Times bestselling author of The Widow Clicquot comes an extraordinary and gripping true account of Irena Sendler—the “female Oskar Schindler”—who took staggering risks to save 2,500 Jewish children from death and deportation in Nazi-occupied Poland during World War II.

In 1942, one young social worker, Irena Sendler, was granted access to the Warsaw ghetto as a 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 ninety percent of their families would perish.

Irena’s Children, “a fascinating narrative of…the extraordinary moral and physical courage of those who chose to fight inhumanity with compassion” (Chaya Deitsch author of Here and There: Leaving Hasidism, Keeping My Family), is a truly heroic tale of survival, resilience, and redemption.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Preface
• Prologue
• Chapter 1: Becoming Irena Sendler
• Chapter 2: Dr. Radlińska’s Girls
• Chapter 3: Those Walls of Shame
• Chapter 4: The Youth Circle
• Chapter 5: Calling Dr. Korczak
• Chapter 6: Ghetto Juggernaut
• Chapter 7: Road to Treblinka
• Chapter 8: The Good Fairy of the Umschlagplatz
• Chapter 9: The Last Mile
• Chapter 10: Agents of the Resistance
• Chapter 11: Żegota
• Chapter 12: Toward the Precipice
• Chapter 13: Ala Rising
• Chapter 14: Aleja Szucha
• Chapter 15: Irena’s Execution
• Chapter 16: Warsaw Fighting
• Chapter 17: How the Stories Ended
• Coda: The Disappearing Story of Irena Sendler, 1946–2008
• Photographs
• Afterword: Author’s Note on the Story of ‘Irena’s Children’
• Acknowledgments
• Cast of Characters
• Reading Group Guide
• About the Author
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Copyright