Author’s Note
Information About Characters
Irena Sendler
Irena Sendler grew up southwest of Warsaw in the resort town of Otwock. Her father, a founding socialist and doctor, died when she was twelve years old. He served the Jewish community selflessly in Otwock, often working for free.
Moving to Warsaw with her mother, Irena attended the University of Warsaw. She became associated with a group of radical thinkers coming out of the Polish Free University. She married Mietek Sendler in 1931, at age twenty-one, but their marriage ended in separation several years before the beginning of World War II. Irena developed a relationship with a Jewish intellectual and attorney, Adam Celnikier, who she became romantically involved with.
Irena began the war working in food distribution. She forged documents for Jewish families so that they could continue to receive food and other social welfare. After the ghetto was sealed off, Irena obtained a permanent pass into the Jewish Quarter to inspect for communicable diseases. She met considerable initial resistance from Jan Dobraczyski, her supervisor, who was a member of the conservative party. He ultimately agreed to assist her but created additional controversy by pushing for Jewish children hiding in Warsaw to be baptized as Catholic.
Irena joined the Polish resistance. She worked with the Jewish community to smuggle children out of the ghetto and hide them in Aryan safe houses with new identifications. Her work was greatly expanded when she was recruited by egota, a resistance branch of the Polish government-in-exile (in London), to run the social welfare section, working with the Jewish community.
Irena, code-named “Jolanta,” worked with a cell of Poles and Jews to smuggle 2,500 Jewish children out of the ghetto. To compare, Oskar Schindler saved approximately 1,200 Jews. She was arrested by the Gestapo in October 1943. Despite months of intense torture, she did not give up any contact information. She was scheduled to be executed in January 1944, but egota managed to bribe a guard and she escaped. She and Adam went into hiding under assumed names but remained actively involved in the resistance movement. They took part in the Polish uprising in Warsaw in 1944.
After the war, Mietek returned from captivity to find Irena five months pregnant with Adam’s child. They divorced shortly thereafter, and Irena and Adam were married. Irena went to work again as a social worker within the Polish government. She was discriminated against by the Soviets and forbidden to tell her experiences from World War II. As time passed, Irena was promoted to more important positions in Poland, and her achievements during the war were increasingly brought to light.
In 1965, Yad Vashem in Israel recognized Irena as one of the Righteous Among the Nations. In 1999, a group of students in Uniontown, Kansas, discovered her story and created a play titled Life in a Jar. This initial movement led to a book and an organization that promotes education related to the Holocaust throughout the world. In 2007 and 2008 she was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize. She passed away on May 12, 2008.
Irena had a difficult personal life after the war. She divorced Adam in 1957 and remarried Mietek in 1961. They divorced again in 1971. Her children expressed mixed feelings about her as a parent. Despite all of this, 2,500 children survived the war thanks to her direct efforts. Irena is a beautiful hero because she was a real human, with flaws, problems, and failures. We want our heroes to be perfect, but each person we look up to suffers from their own shortcomings, their own warts. The complexity of Irena’s personality is much richer than a two-dimensional heroine.
Dr. Janusz Korczak
Dr. Korczak was born in 1878 or 1879. He was a pediatrician who focused his career on the humane treatment of orphans and on children’s rights. He was a well-known individual in Poland before World War II.
When the Warsaw ghetto was formed, he moved his orphanage inside the walls, eventually to Sienna Street. He kept about two hundred children at the orphanage along with a dozen staff. Because of his advocacy and reputation, the orphanage received significant donations of food, money, and resources, despite the desperate conditions within the orphanage itself.
In early August 1942, the Germans marched the children of the orphanage off to the Umschlagplatz. Dr. Korczak had opportunities to escape into hiding prior to the evacuation but refused to do this. Many people witnessed his conduct on the hours-long march from the orphanage to the train embarkation. He was calm, in charge, and encouraging to the children and those around him. He assuredly knew his fate, and the fate of the children, but he acted with incredible bravery to keep the children as calm and reassured as possible. It is said that at the train platform there were additional efforts to save him, but he refused, staying with his children to the end.
Ewa Rechtman
One of Irena’s pre-war friends and social workers. Ewa lost her job early in the German occupation of Poland, as did all Jewish professionals. Ewa lived in the ghetto from fall 1940 until the summer of 1942, assisting Irena and Dr. Korczak. Irena attempted to save her, but Ewa refused to leave her work in the ghetto. She died in Treblinka in the summer of 1942.
Ala Golab-Grynberg
Ala was a close friend of Irena’s. She was appointed the head nurse in the ghetto by the Judenrat, the Jewish council in charge of the ghetto. She worked tirelessly to help the population of the Jewish Quarter. She refused Irena’s efforts to save her life, but her daughter, Rami, was brought out into hiding and ultimate safety. She was transferred to work in one of the factories late in the life of the ghetto, and ultimately moved to a labor camp outside Warsaw where, defiant as ever, she was killed in an uprising. Her daughter, Rami, survived the war.
Wiera Gran
Wiera Gran, the stage name for Dwojra Grynberg, was a well-known singer and actress in Poland before World War II. During the ghetto period, she sang in the cafés, sometimes with composer and musician Władysław Szpilman of The Pianist fame. Wiera escaped from the ghetto and went into hiding. She survived the war.
She was arrested and tried after the war as a German collaborator, with many prominent Poles testifying against her, including Szpilman. She was found not guilty in 1949 and released. She spent the rest of her life attempting to clear her name. Her innocence or guilt is still shrouded in mystery to this day.
Klaus Rein
Klaus Rein is a fictional character. However, his story is not unusual in Nazi Germany and typifies how easy it was to commit atrocities. Klaus came from a poor family and he became an adult during the troubled economic and political times in Germany between the world wars.
Klaus lost his job during the depression in the early 1930s and, like millions of people worldwide during this time, would have sunk to the depths of despair. His fortunes change when Adolf Hitler rises to power in 1933. This new leader takes over Germany, promising new jobs and a bright future. Germany begins a massive rearmament. The economy recovers, there are new jobs, new opportunities. Perhaps more important, he tells this generation that grew up after Germany’s defeat in World War I that their nation is a great one, that it’s not their fault that they lost the last war. He promises a future where Germany will be the first nation on the earth. There will be jobs, money, family, arts, culture, everything anyone would want.
Klaus finds new employment as a policeman. He is married and starts a family. Everything that has gone well in his life has happened thanks to Hitler and the Nazi party. When the war starts, everything Hitler promised is coming to pass. They defeat Poland, France, they have England on the ropes. Klaus finds new opportunities in Poland, he has a better job, house, and social structure than he’s ever dreamt of. He may struggle with his conscience now, as certain regrettable things are happening in Warsaw, but he’s been taught for a decade that Germans are better than other people, particularly Slavs like the Poles. What he’s doing is a necessary short-term evil. After all, didn’t millions perish in the last world war?
As the war turns against them, he sees his world start to crumble. His own fortunes begin to fall. He must send his family home to sa
fety as the Russians approach. As Germany begins to lose the war, everyone is pointing fingers. His loss of stature is not surprising. He becomes increasingly desperate, taking greater and greater risks to protect himself.
Finally, he loses everything in Poland, as does Germany. Klaus retreats to his hometown and waits for the inevitable. He may not have the resources or connections to escape to the west, where the Americans or British might be gentler with his family. He can only await the awful vengeance of the Russians. When they arrive in Poland, he knows he will be found out. He will be tried and killed. His wife and daughter will likely face rape and perhaps murder. Such was the life of a good many Germans in the SS during World War II. Klaus’s actions and life are not defensible. But it is terribly important to understand just how easily one can walk down this road. Whether in ancient Rome, with the Mongolian hordes of Genghis Khan, or in Rwanda, Sudan, or Bosnia, genocide comes all too easily to humankind.
Peter Schwarzmann
Also a fictional character. Peter represents the double standard Klaus could apply to those he cared about. Klaus followed a strict code of conduct through the war. He was fastidious and a rule follower. However, he turned a blind eye to Peter’s drinking, gluttony, and womanizing, because he was family.
This is yet another example of the complexity of humans. Just as Irena, the heroine, carried on an affair throughout the war and had a difficult relationship with her husbands, mother, and children, so is Klaus, the Gestapo murderer, a wonderful husband, father, and boss.
Hermann Göring, the number-two Nazi directly below Adolf Hitler, was a passionate advocate for animal rights. During the Nazi regime, with his encouragement, Germany passed the widest ranging and forward-thinking animal rights laws of any nation on earth at that time.
Irena’s Children
The legacy of the 2,500 children secreted to safety cannot be measured. Almost all of the children’s parents were killed in the death camp at Treblinka or died in other camps or by starvation or murder within the ghetto.
The jars where all the children’s names were hidden were never recovered, but Irena and some of her friends were able to re-create much of the information from memory. Irena was a tireless advocate after the war for assisting these children to return to their roots, although with most of their families eradicated by the Nazis, this was a difficult if not impossible task.
In any event, there are generations of families now who owe their existence to Irena and her associates. She is a true heroine.
Further Reading
Because of the realities of a novel, the author was forced to pare down the number of individuals mentioned in the story. Irena’s network of friends and associates was extensive. A fantastic and detailed nonfiction book written about Irena Sendler’s life is Irena’s Children, by Tilar J. Mazzeo.
Another interesting read is Life in a Jar: The Irena Sendler Project, by Jack Mayer, which covers both Irena’s life and the story of the Kansas high school children who discovered her story and brought it widespread knowledge in the United States. This group continues to fund educational programs through their website: www.irenasendler.org.
Acknowledgments
I want to thank my agent, Evan Marshall, and editor, John Scognamiglio, at Kensington Books, for all their support and work in putting together this novel. Special thanks to my wife, Becky, and Mr. P., Ken, Jan (Mom), Cynthia, and Darren, who read through my drafts. Thank you also to Grace, who helped with first draft proofreading.
A READING GROUP GUIDE
IRENA’S WAR
James D. Shipman
ABOUT THIS GUIDE
The suggested questions are included to enhance your group’s reading of James D. Shipman’s Irena’s War!
DISCUSSION QUESTIONS
1. The Soviets and the Germans were ideological enemies on the extreme left and the extreme right. Why did they ally themselves and attack Poland?
2. Was it unethical/immoral for Irena to continue working in the Polish government after the Germans took over?
3. Irena’s actions put the lives of her fellow social workers at risk. Did she owe any duty of safety to those in her department who were not involved, and potentially unaware of her actions?
4. What motivated Irena? Was she truly motivated to help these children or was this a selfish action on her part to resist the Germans and maintain an important role during the war?
5. There is a scene in the story when Klaus overeats at his daughter’s birthday party. At the same time, he comes up with the solution to cut the calories of the ghetto inhabitants from 600 to 300 per day. Members of the Nazi party were capable of strong family connections and other noble traits while also able to perpetuate incredible atrocities. How does this happen?
6. Irena did not give up the names of any of her contacts during months of torture. There are other documented instances during World War II of women handling torture more effectively than men (such as four women conspirators caught during a revolt in Auschwitz). Why might this be the case?
7. Who was the most heroic person in the book and why?
8. Why did the Soviets, after the war was over, suppress Irena’s role in helping Jewish children?
9. Irena had a complicated relationship with her mother, carried on an affair during the war, had a difficult relationship with her children, and was divorced three times. Do those personal issues change the way you view her wartime heroics?
10. If you put yourself in Irena’s shoes, could you do what she did? Would you have escaped Warsaw early in the war, as her mother desired? Would you stick to your duties in the department? Is Irena extraordinary, or would many people in her position do the same?
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