The Hero Within

"Every child saved with my help is the justification of my existence on this Earth, and not a title to glory."[9]
Irena Sendler—Letter to the Polish Parliament

In every one of us there is a hero waiting to get out.

Like Underdog- just regular people with a desire to fight for justice,or fairness- or against dark forces; to be a voice for those who cannot speak up for themselves.

Society tells us to 'keep you head down' 'don't get involved' and 'don't rock the boat'.

I'm here to tell you that there is a hero in YOU.

The following is a story about one of these amazing souls that came to this Earth to be a hero. Their praises are not always sung and when they are it is usually after they've died.

Be inspired to be a Hero in your life through Irena Sendler's story.

The little lady above is Irean Sendler. Born Feb 15, 1910 and left this Earth May 12, 2008
She was a Polish Catholic social worker who served in the Polish Underground and the Żegota resistance organization in German-occupied Warsaw during World War II.

Assisted by some two dozen other Żegota members, Irena Sendler saved 2,500 Jewish children by smuggling them out of the Warsaw Ghetto, providing them false documents, and sheltering them in individual and group children's homes outside the Ghetto.[2]
She cooperated with the Children's Section of the Municipal Administration, linked with the RGO (Central Welfare Council), a Polish relief organization that was tolerated under German supervision. She organized the smuggling of Jewish children out of the Ghetto, carrying them out in boxes, suitcases and trolleys.[2] Under the pretext of conducting inspections of sanitary conditions during a typhoid outbreak, Sendler visited the Ghetto and smuggled out babies and small children in ambulances and trams, sometimes disguising them as packages.[6] She also used the old courthouse at the edge of the Warsaw Ghetto (still standing) as one of the main routes for smuggling out children.

The children were placed with Polish families, the Warsaw orphanage of the Sisters of the Family of Mary, or Roman Catholic convents such as the Little Sister Servants of the Blessed Virgin Mary Conceived Immaculate[7] at Turkowice and Chotomów. Some children were smuggled to priests in parish rectories. She hid lists of their names in jars in order to keep track of their original and new identities. Żegota assured the children that, when the war was over, they would be returned to Jewish relatives.[8]

In 1943 Irena was arrested by the Gestapo, severely tortured, and sentenced to death. Żegota saved her by bribing German guards on the way to her execution. She was left in the woods, unconscious and with broken arms and legs.[2] She was listed on public bulletin boards as among those executed. For the remainder of the war, she lived in hiding, but continued her work for the Jewish children. After the war, she dug up the jars containing the children's identities and attempted to find the children and return them to their parents. However, almost all of their parents had been killed at the Treblinka extermination camp or had gone missing otherwise.

After the war and the Soviet takeover of Poland, she was at first persecuted and imprisoned by the communist Polish state authorities for her relations with the Polish government in exile and with the Home Army. While in prison she miscarried her second child and her other children were later denied the right to study at communist controlled Polish universities.

In 2007 considerable publicity[11] accompanied Sendler's nomination for the Nobel Peace Prize.[12] While failed nominations for the award have not been officially announced by the Nobel organization for 50 years, the International Peace Research Institute, Oslo, reported in 2007 that Irena Sendler's nominator had made the nomination public. [13] Regardless of its legitimacy, talk of the nomination focused a spotlight on Sendler and her wartime achievements. The 2007 award instead went to Al Gore, former Vice President of the United States, and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

Sendler's story was brought to light in the United States when students in Kansas found it described in a magazine and popularized it through their original play Life in a Jar.

On April 19, 2009, The Courageous Heart of Irena Sendler, a Hallmark Hall of Fame production written and directed by John Kent Harrison and starring Anna Paquin in the title role, was broadcast by CBS.