My First Guest Post!!!

Thanks to my sister Sean MacKenzie at Fictionista, I did my first guest post for another blog. It is about Irena Sendler, entitled "The Angel of Warsaw," in honor of Holocaust Remembrance Month. So, please check it out.

Thanks and God Bless!

The Woman Who Loved Children

Irena Sendler rescued 2,500 children from the Nazi death camps. Her story, writes Marti Attoun in Ladies' Home Journal, was rescued by three Kansas teens.

And her story is astounding, as awe-inspiring as that of Oskar Schindler, whose courageous acts of Nazi resistance became a book and an Academy Award-winning film. But unlike Schindler, who received international acclaim, Sendler had been a footnote in history for nearly 60 years.‚ That all changed in September 1999, when three teenagers in a small town in Kansas were looking for a topic for a history project and stumbled upon a short mention of Sendler in an article in a 5-year-old newsmagazine. As a Catholic social worker, the article said, Sendler had organized the rescue of 2,500 Jewish babies and children from the Nazi-controlled Warsaw ghetto in 1942 and 1943.

"We thought it was a typo," recalls Elizabeth Cambers, now 18 and a college freshman. "We thought it was supposed to say she rescued 250 children, not 2,500."

In September 1939, when the Nazis invaded Poland, Sendler was a 29-year-old social worker employed by Warsaw's social-welfare department. An only child, she had been just 7 when her father, a Catholic doctor, contracted typhus and died after treating Jews during a 1917 typhus outbreak . But she never forgot his sacrifice. "I was taught that if a man is drowning, it is irrelevant what is his religion or nationality, " Sendler has said. "One must help him. It is a need of the heart."

In the fall of 1940, Sendler watched as the Nazis forced 350,000 Jews inside the Warsaw ghetto, a 16-square-block area that was walled off and guarded. With each passing month of the war, the torment of the people locked inside intensified. They were dying of starvation and disease while unknowingly waiting for the Nazis to herd them into freight cars that would ultimately take them to their deaths in the gas chambers.

Sendler joined Zegota, the code name for the Council for Aid to Jews in Occupied Poland, an underground network founded in December 1942 by psychologist Adolf Berman and six other prominent scholars, religious leaders, and social activists. The secret organization, which forged thousands of birth certificates and other documents to give Jews safe Aryan identities, asked Sendler to head up their operation to smuggle Jewish children out of the Warsaw ghetto.

But first she had to get inside. Because the Nazis were on guard against the spread of infections, they allowed the delivery of medicine inside the Ghetto. A Zegota member working inside the Polish disease department forged a permit that allowed Sendler to work undercover as a nurse inside the ghetto. Her code name was Jolanta.With the help of 10 "messenger friends," as Sendler called her colleagues, and dozens of volunteers, she organized the effort to sneak the Children to orphanages, convents, and private homes in the Warsaw region.

Children who were old enough to talk were taught to rattle off Christian prayers and mimic other religious behavior (such as how to make the sign of the cross) so they could live safely without arousing suspicion of their Jewish heritage.

Sendler and Zegota devised several routes for smuggling children out of the ghetto. Kids escaped on foot or in the arms of volunteers through sewer pipes or basements with underground passageways. Many also escaped through the courthouse, which had entrances on both the ghetto side and Aryan side. Other methods were more inventive. For instance, a trolley driver and Zegota member, when crossing from the ghetto to the Aryan side, hid little ones in trunks, suitcases, or sacks under his back-seat, where the Nazi guards could not see. Another supporter, an ambulance driver, kept his dog beside him in the front seat and trained him to bark to camouflage any cries or noises from the babies hidden under stretchers in back. Sendler also arranged for babies and children to be sedated and smuggled out with merchants in potato sacks, under their loads of goods. Sometimes, she even sneaked sedated children out in body bags, telling the guards that they were dead.

Day after day, for about 16 months, Sendler persuaded parents and grandparents to hand over their babies and children, to give them a chance to live. "There were terrible scenes," Sendler says. "One mother & I wanted a child to leave the ghetto while the father did not. The grandma wanted, the husband did not. They asked what was the guarantee? What kind of guarantee could I give them?" She couldn't even guarantee that she could get past the guards. On slips of tissue paper, Sendler recorded the identity of every child she rescued. Whenever possible, she wrote down the child's Jewish name as well as the child's new Christian name and new address. Sendler buried these names in jars under an apple tree in a friend's garden. After the war, Sendler hoped, the children would be located and their Jewish identities revealed to them.

On Oct. 20, 1943, the Gestapo arrested Sendler. They had long suspected she was running a smuggling operation, and one of her messengers had been caught and tortured until she gave up Sendler's name and home address. The Gestapo interrogated Sendler, demanding information about the identities of the other rescuers and the children in hiding. But she refused to talk, even when she was beaten until her legs and feet were broken. "I was quiet as a mouse," Sendler has said. "I would have rather died than disclose anything about our operations." She was then taken to Pawiak prison, where she was sentenced to be executed.

At the last minute, however, the woman who had rescued so many others was herself rescued. On the day she was to be executed, Zegota paid ahefty bribe to a guard, who allowed Sendler to escape. The guard subsequently posted Sendler's name on public bulletin boards as one of the executed, essentially rendering her invisible to the Nazis. She then went into hiding in Poland, just like the children she'd saved.

When Poland was liberated a year and three months later, in January 1945, Sendler returned to the friend's garden and dug up the jars. She turned over the rescued children's names to Zegota's Berman, and he and other members of the group tried to locate the children's foster families.‚ Sadly, most of the children had no parents or grandparents to be found. Less than 1 percent of the Jews inside the ghetto survived the war, most having perished at the Treblinka death camp in northeast Poland. After the war, Sendler married, raised two children of her own, and continued her career as a social worker in Warsaw. The beatings she had suffered at the hands of the Gestapo left her permanently disabled and she has had trouble walking ever since. But she never talked openly about her rescue work. Poland was under a communist regime, and the postwar climate wasn't safe. For almost 60 years, her story was essentially lost to history.

Then, in March 2000, she received a letter from Elizabeth Cambers and two of her classmates at Uniontown High School in Uniontown, Kan. Encouraged by their social studies teacher, the girls had selected Sendler as the subject of their National History Day project, and though information about her was scarce, they had been able to write a 10-minute play, titled "Life in a Jar", that had already won first place at the state level of the national contest. "We explained who we were and what we were doing," says Sabrina Coons, now 20 and a student at Kansas State University. "We told her that we found her story amazing."

Sendler's response, handwritten in Polish, arrived in Kansas three weeks later. "I am very eager to receive and read your play,"Sendler wrote. In a series of letters, Sendler answered the students'questions, and slowly the details of her remarkable story unfolded; an international friendship was forged.

After an emotional performance of Life in a Jar at Uniontown High, the students were invited to perform the play for church groups, nursing homes, and civic organizations throughout southeast Kansas. Through their correspondence with Sendler, the teens learned that she lived quite meagerly. So at each performance, they set out a donation jar. Their first gift to Sendler was $3, which they told her to use for postage. "We found out later that she gave the $3 away to a children's home," says Coons. "That's just how she is."

Although the girls didn't win any awards when they traveled to Maryland in June 2000 to compete in the national contest, their play gained national and international attention, and the students have since given more than 100 performances of the play in eight different states. As a result, Sendler has received numerous awards for her courageous work. After learning she was

to be given a $10,000 humanitarian award from the American Center of Polish Culture in Washington, she wrote to her girls "My emotion is being shadowed by the fact that no one from the circle of my faithful coworkers, who constantly risked their lives, could live long enough to enjoy all the honors that now are falling upon me.... I can't find the words to thank you, my dear girls.... Before the day you have written the play "Life in a Jar" -- nobody in my own country and in the whole world cared about my person and my work during the war ..." One member of a Kansas City audience was so profoundly moved by Sendler's story that he raised money to send the play's three authors to Poland to meet Sendler in May 2001.

"It wasn't real until I actually met Irena," says Megan Stewart. "We all ran up and hugged her. She wanted to just hold our hands and hear about our lives." Cambers told Sendler, "I love you. You are my hero." Sendler, a 4-foot-11-inch woman who now uses a wheelchair, deflected the girls' praise. "A hero is someone doing extraordinary things," she told them.. "What I did was not extraordinary. It was a normal thing to do.

"From "The Woman Who Loved Children," Ladies' Home Journal Print Edition, December 2006.

Confessions of a Holocaust Addict

Have you ever had a fascination with a subject or a person that wholly consumes you until you don’t know where you begin and it ends? Mine is the Holocaust. It is perhaps one of the darkest periods in the history of mankind and I am obsessed with it. I can’t explain why. Its not like I have a personal connection to it. No one in my family suffered through it nor do I have any friends who were survivors of it. But every since I read Anne Frank’s diary, I can’t stop myself from studying it. Oh, I have gone months and years without reading about it, but then I encounter a story or learn about a person who lived in during that hell, and I’m diving back in.

Moderation is the key with any interest or hobby. Unfortunately that isn’t the case with my fascination. I can read on average five books on the Holocaust every week, and watch two movies or documentaries as well. That doesn’t count the Internet research that I do. By three months end, I am mentally and emotionally exhausted. For three months I recuperate and then when I’m feeling good and refreshed again, I fall into the same cycle.

Last week some time I realized that I couldn’t do it anymore. I’m tired of the vicious cycle that I fall into. I need a break and I mean a real break. I may read a book here and there and if a new movie comes out, I’ll have to watch it. But I don’t intend to do any serious studying on the Holocaust for a few years- like at least five. Maybe by then I will remember why I started studying it in the first place. Sometimes I forget that the Holocaust just isn’t a subject to read about- it is about individuals like Anne Frank, Oskar Schindler, Sophie Scholl, Irena Sendler, Eva Mozes-Kor, Eli Weisel, Simon Wiesenthal, etc.

I had planned on dedicating this month's blog posts to lesser-known stories about the Holocaust, but I just can’t do it now. Maybe later on this year or next year sometime.

Thank you for reading my thoughts.

The Courageous Heart of Irena Sendler: Movie Review

::Spoiler Alert!::

It’s the early 1940’s in Warsaw, Poland. Two years into the war and earlier that year the Germans pushed the Russians back into the Soviet Union and claimed complete control of Poland. The Nazi death machine is in full swing. The Jewish citizens have been living in the ghetto for some time now yet optimistically hope for the best. However, a handful of people sees the truth for what it is; the German’s ultimate goal is to wipe the Jewish people off the face of the earth. Irena Sendler, a young social worker in Warsaw, works inside the ghetto. As the situation continues to decline, she along with other resistance fighters and members of Zegota work feverishly to rescue children from the German’s clutches. By the war’s end she saves 2,500 children, twice as many people as Oscar Schindler.
“The Courageous Heart” follows Irena’s life from when she began her mission of saving children to her own arrest and going into hiding herself. Anna Paquin brings Irena Sendler to life as a spunky and brave young woman who nearly loses her life for a cause that she believes in. Marcia Gay Harden portrays Irena’s sickly but supportive mother. And Goran Visnjic, is handsome and trustworthy Stefan, Irena’s love interest.

Violence:
While I absolutely loved this movie, I would caution that this movie is not suited for children or young teens. Keep in mind that most of the scenes feature Irena in the ghetto and though Hallmark didn’t do anything too graphic, there are innocent people shown being fatally shot; starvation and disease runs rampant in the ghetto. Orphan children are herded into a cattle car destined for a concentration camp. At one point a boy and his father are included in one of the transports, and the father makes the dangerously risks his son’s life by crushing the floorboards and pushing his son through the hole. The most gruesome part of the entire movie is the last twenty minutes when Irena is arrested by the Gestapo and interrogated. When she isn’t forthcoming about her clandestine work, the Gestapo agents restrain her and beat her legs, repeatedly. Her feet are broken and she is unable to walk on her own, so the agents drag her up a flight of stairs for interrogations and back down again to her cell, at least twice. Her cellmates bandage her feet for her. When Irena and several others are sent to be executed, it is then that she is freed thanks to Zegota.

Sex and Nudity:
Sex and nudity is non-existent, and for a movie about the holocaust that is unusual. There is a sweet relationship between Irena and her friend Stefan. After he comes to hide in the Sendler’s apartment, he is shown working on a secret hiding place in one of the wardrobes. He shows Irena and the two get locked in. They share a kiss then and again at the end of the movie when they are reunited.

Religion:
“The Courageous Heart” shows Irena, her mother and the other working in the resistance as respecters of all peoples and religions. Irena, herself is a Catholic, but never goes so far as pushing her religion on others. She does admit to the parents of the children that she rescues that the children will be put in Christian families and will have to disguise themselves as Christians for their own protection. Jewish parents are torn between sending their children to live with Christian strangers and live as Christians or watch their children perish along with them. Irena and other resistance workers are shown teaching children Christian prayers, how to cross themselves and other elements of the Catholic faith in order to save them.

Overall Opinion:
One thing I did notice is that Irena and her mother are referred to as “Miss Sendler” and “Mrs. Sendler,” respectively. And Stefan was given a different last name. In reality that is incorrect. Stefan’s last name was Sendler and Irena only gained that name when she married him. The only reason I can think of for Hallmark doing this is that Irena is not known by her maiden name and it might have been too confusing to refer to her as such. Other than that, I have no other nit-picks. Great production, superb acting. The only other projects I have seen Anna Paquin in was when she played young Jane in “Jane Eyre” and a leading role in “Fly Away Home.” However, I’ll keep my eye out for any of her movies now. This movie also interests me in reading Irena Sendler’s own autobiography “Life in a Jar,” and Ana Mieszkowska’s biography, “Mother of the Children of the Holocaust: The Irena Sendler Story” on which this movie is based.

The Courageous Heart of Irena Sendler

On Sunday, April 19th, CBS will be featuring "The Courageous Heart of Irena Sendler," docu-drama on the rescuer of 2,500 Jewish children. This female Oscar Schindler lived to be 98 years old and was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize. Below is the press release from CBS.





The drama is based on the courageous true story of Nobel Peace Prize nominee Irena Sendler (Paquin), who is credited with saving the lives of 2,500 Jewish children during World War II. Academy Award winner and nominee Marcia Gay Harden (”Pollock,” “Mystic River”), Nathaniel Parker (”The Inspector Lynley Mysteries”) and Goran Visnjic (”ER”) also star. Harden plays Sendler’s mother, Janina, and Parker portrays Dr. Majkowski, the head of Warsaw’s Department of Health who helped Sendler obtain important resources for her mission. Visnjic plays Stefan, a former university friend of Sendler who was Jewish and with whom she fell in love when she started her clandestine work in the Warsaw ghetto.

As a Polish Catholic social worker in the early 1940s, Irena Sendler created and led a conspiracy of women who moved in and out of Warsaw’s Jewish Ghetto disguised as nurses employed by Warsaw’s Health Department. Though they worked under the guise of merely attempting to prevent and contain the spread of Typhus and Spotted Fever, Sendler and her brave cohorts emerged each time with the children of consenting Jewish parents. The children were sometimes sedated and hidden inside boxes, suitcases and coffins as a means of rescuing them from their imminent deportation to death camps. They were given new identities and placed with Polish families and in convents. Sendler kept a hidden record of their birth names and where they were placed with the hope that they would some day be reunited with their own families.

In 1943, the Nazis discovered Sendler’s daring and dangerous ruse and arrested her. She was tortured by Gestapo agents and suffered broken feet. On the day of her scheduled execution she was rescued by “Zegota,” the underground network with which she worked to save the Jewish children.

As a result of Sendler’s efforts, approximately 2,500 children were smuggled to safety. Not a single child she rescued was ever betrayed or discovered by the Nazis.

The movie is based on the authorized biography of the heroine, Mother of the Children of the Holocaust: The Irena Sendler Story, by Anna Mieszkowska, published in 2005.

In 2007 Sendler was nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize. That same year, Hallmark Hall of Fame acquired exclusive movie rights to the book and negotiated life-rights with Sendler and her family members. Sendler died on May 12, 2008 at the age of 98.

Irena Sendler

According to imdb.com, this coming April, "Miss Irena's Children" will be featured on the Hallmark Hall of Fame. It is the story of Irena Sendler, the Polish social worker who was active in the Polish underground during World War II. Not only did she save the lives of 2,500 Jewish children by smuggling them out of the Warsaw ghetto, Irena was arrested for her acts, imprisoned and tortured by the Gestapo. The Polish resistance was able to bribe the authorities to release her and she spent the remainder of the war in hiding, but continued to rescue children from the Nazis' clutches. She was nominated for the Nobel Peace prize but lost to Al Gore and his slideshow on Global Warming. Irena died in 2007 at age 97. Anna Paquin is slated to star as Irena. More info in the coming months.

Director: John Kent Harrison (Pope John Paul II (2005), In Love and War (2001) (TV))
Writers: John Kent Harrison, Larry Spagnola
Filming Locations: Riga, Latvia

Anna Paquin ... Irena Sendler
Marcia Gay Harden ... Janina Sendler
Goran Visnjic ... Stephane
Michelle Dockery ... Eva Rozenfeld
Paul Freeman ... Monsignor Godlewski
Fiona Glascott ... Maria
Steve Speirs ... Piotr
Danny Webb ... Trojan
Scott Handy ... Michal Laski
Leigh Lawson ... Rabbi Rozenfeld
Iddo Goldberg ... Jacob Rozenfeld
Rebecca Night ... Danuta
Sofya Skya ... Mother
Rebecca Windheim ... Karolyna
Sakalas Uzdavinys ... Young Rabbi
Maja Ostaszewska ... Jadwiga
Krzysztof Pieczynski ... Dr. Janusz Korczak
Danuta Stenka ... Hannah Rozenfeld
Olga Boladz ... Zofia
Janis Reinis ... SS Officer
Sergejs Marcenko ... Jasio
Girts Krumins ... German Accountant
William Ellis ... Viktor
Elea Hofland ... Anna