Reach across the barriers — you’ll find people like yourself

When we feel small in the enormity of world events, swept along in a powerful tide, headed in a direction we may not have chosen, it is good to know a single person can make a difference.

Such a person was Irena Sendler. A Polish nurse and social worker, she risked her life to smuggle Jewish children — thousands of them — from the Warsaw Ghetto during World War II.

Few people knew of her heroic work until 2000 when four girls in a tiny Kansas town — Unionville, population 298 — wrote a play called “Life in a Jar.” The students’ research had turned up little about Sendler — the Communist regime that followed the Nazis in Poland had had little regard for Sendler — until they discovered she was still alive and wrote her a letter.

“To my dear and beloved girls very close to my heart,” Sendler wrote back. “I am curious if you are an exception or more young people in your country are interested in the Holocaust. I think your work is unique and worth disseminating.”

The letter started a friendship that lasted until Sendler’s death in 2008, detailed on the “Life in a Jar” website. The girls traveled to Poland to meet Sendler and their play has been performed hundreds of times. She was honored by the pope and nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize.

Her story will play out locally this month on Jan. 24 in a presentation of “Life in a Jar” at the First United Methodist Church of Voorheesville (details in our Community Calendar).

Dianne Luci wanted to bring the story to her church. “Traveling is my passion in life,” said Luci who has visited countries around the world. “If we knew more about everybody’s culture and history, we wouldn’t be in the debacle we are today,” she said. In the past, Luci has hosted a forum at her church with members of the Christian, Jewish, Hindu, Buddhist, and Muslim faiths.

“I wanted to present this to people who want to go back in time,” said Luci of “Life in a Jar.” “They put their lives on the line,” she said of Sendler and others in the Polish Underground.

Sendler grew up in a home open to anyone in need, regardless of their faith. Her father, a doctor, treated patients others would not; he died of typhus when she was a child. As a student at Warsaw University, after a Jewish friend was beaten by nationalist thugs, Sendler crossed out the stamp on her grade card that allowed her sit in the seats reserved for “Aryans,” and was suspended.

After the Nazis herded 400,000 Jews into four square kilometers, disease was rampant as those in the Warsaw Ghetto had little food and poor sanitation. The fear of typhus, which would kill Germans, too, led the Nazis to allow nurses like Sendler into the guarded ghetto to vaccinate its residents.

“She smuggled babies out in suitcases, in garbage tucks, in coffins, any way she could,” said Luci. “She knew they would die if she didn’t.”

Sendler also knew, if she were caught, she would be killed, and her family members would suffer, too.

She took a further risk by recording the names and details of the children’s families along with their new Christian names so that they could find their way back to their families later. The students were placed with Polish families or in convents. The all-important papers, to one day link the children to their real families, were buried in jars — inspiring the play’s title.

Sadly, the vast majority of their parents either died in the ghetto or were killed at Treblinka.

The Gestapo arrested and tortured Sendler, breaking her feet and legs, but she did not give up the names of the children she rescued or of the people who had helped smuggle them out of the ghetto and find them new homes. She was sentenced to death; saved by a bribe from execution, she continued her work under a false name.

The film to be shown on Jan. 24 includes interviews with people Sendler saved and “graphic footage” of the Warsaw Ghetto, said Luci.

She believes the lessons in the film are relevant today. “Look at what’s being said about the Muslims in our country, listen to the rhetoric flying around,” said Luci. “This could happen here,” she said of forcibly segregating people of a particular faith or ethnicity. “Look what happened to the Japanese here during World War II.”

She went on about the value of real travel as well as time travel. “I traveled to Turkey. I loved Istanbul and its people,” said Luci. “I love being immersed in different cultures,” said Luci, “getting to know the people.”

With emotion in her voice, Luci quoted something Sendler’s father said to her as a girl: “Always remember, Irena, there are good people and bad people in the world...If you see someone drowning, always try to save them.”

The young Sendler had asked her father, “What if I can’t swim?”

“Still try,” he had answered.

“Irena saw the people in the ghetto as if they were drowning,” said Luci. She saved as many as she could.

Luci, too, learned from her own father. She grew up on the grounds of the Marcy State Hospital in Utica where her father worked as a psychiatrist. “This was before tranquilizers,” she said. “I remember listening to people shout and scream and carry on...My father mentored foreign students going into psychiatry. We’d have them to our home for dinner...Our housecleaner was one of the patients.”

Some of the children from the hospital went to public school with Luci; other children made fun of them and ridiculed them.

“I had an empathetic ear for people with mental illness,” she said. “I was sensitized.”

To this day, she reaches out to all kinds of people. “I can’t stand in a grocery line without starting up a conversation,” she said.

We admire Luci’s efforts to bring diverse elements of a community together. She organizes Voorheesville’s farmers’ market each summer. One of the vendors is from Croatia; she is visiting there next month.

We see here an ever-widening ripple. A brave and noble woman, Irena Sendler, saved the lives of doomed children. A half-century later, four young women from rural Kansa discovered and told her story. Now, a Voorheesville woman is spreading that story here.

We need to be part of spreading that ripple. We must learn to be open and empathetic to people who may be different than us or labeled as such. We must learn to act if we see people being treated unfairly. We must learn to be bold and selfless in the face of wrong.

If someone is drowning, we must try to save him.

 
— Melissa Hale-Spencer

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