Life in a Jar: The Irena Sendler Project

One day in July, Irena picks up a child named Guta; she takes her through the crowded streets, then through the courthouse tunnels and onto the tram on the other side. On the tram, Guta becomes increasingly more distraught. She cries out “Haks Rakhmunes!”—a Yiddish plea meaning “Have mercy,” which would have gone unnoticed in the ghetto but clearly marks the child as Jewish on the tram, “a confession punishable by death” (175). The tram operator, however, applies the emergency brakes and orders everyone but Irena and Guta off the tram. He then takes them to a quiet street and lets them off where they will be, comparatively, safe.

Irena meets with Schmuel daily in order to exchange information about the upcoming deportations. Schmuel begins to pressure Irena to convince Ewa to marry him for her own safety, before the deportations reach her. Irena continues to try.

She additionally continues to fret over the imbalance between their number saved and the number of deportations. On a good day, her network can evacuate 15 children, whereas the Germans routinely deport 6,000 people. Irena Schultz tries to remind Irena that they cannot live their lives “suffer[ing]for those [they] could not save” (176), but Irena Sendler is keenly aware that, should she survive, she almost certainly will.

At the end of the first week of deportations, Irena visits Ewa, who cannot “have weighed more than 100 pounds”(177), at home with some luxuries for her—sardines and butter; she makes her promise not to give it to her Youth Circle. Adam is looking for Irena; he has a message for Stefan. He has also just come from a resistance meeting where his group called for active resistance but were denied. Adam and Ewa fight about Schmuel and proper forms of resistance; he promises that he is “going to kill some fucking Germans,” and Ewa once again argues that for “every German [they] kill, [the Germans] kill 100” (178) of them. He leaves, promising never to return.

In August, Schmuel discovers that Ewa’s block is slated to be deported; he contacts Irena, begging her to convince Ewa to marry him. Irena, however, is unable to convince Ewa, either to marry Schmuel or to let Irena help her escape. Ewa instead insists that she go down the hall knocking on doors until she can find a baby to help escape. She finds two.

The Jewish Police no longer assist in the deportations; instead, the SS are in complete control, rounding up everyone in each building and systematically executing anyone they find remaining in the buildings.

Irena is informed by Schmuel of the decision to deport Dr. Korczak and the children in his orphanage, warning her that it was a high-level decision, and that there is nothing she can do for him or the children. She discovers that they were rounded up in a predawn raid, the children lined up for the two-mile march. Irena follows the march through the streets. Whereas the other marches were filled with jeering and violence, the crowd watching the orphans’ march is silent and placid. After they arrive, Irena continues to watch at a distance. As the orphans are loaded onto a train, a German officer halts the proceedings and hands Dr. Korczak a paper; Dr. Korczak reads the paper, lets it fall to the ground, then states in both Polish and German that he “will stay with the children” (183).

At this point, “the prospect of death [is] acknowledged by all but the most deluded” (183). Nearly everyone is willing to surrender their children, overwhelming Irena’s network. Unexpectedly, the ghetto boundaries are redrawn, eliminating the courthouse as a means of escape. Irena meets with Adam to arrange for the children to be evacuated through the sewers, which is how his resistance group, ZOB, gets around Warsaw. Adam accedes, for Ewa, but insists that her evacuations cannot interfere with his group’s activities.

Schmuel continues to provide Irena with the next blocks to be deported. Irena faces “a serious backlog of rescued children” due to a lack of “emergency care homes” (183) in which to place them. Stanislawa regularly hides four or five children, and children are routinely hidden at the Warsaw Zoo.

Two more of Irena’s network are discovered: one, Marta, is shot; another, Stefja, is arrested and taken to Pawiak Prison. Irena and Jaga are again concerned about what might be given up under interrogation—Stefja is only 16, even younger than Helena was. They consider how much it would cost to bribe a guard to release Stefja, but Jan tells Jaga that “even God doesn’t have that kind of money” (187). Beyond this, they fear that someone, either in the office or elsewhere, has betrayed them.

The deportations end on Yom Kippur; only 30,000 people now populate the Jewish ghetto, although another 30,000 likely remain in hiding. Irena meets with Adam about families in need of evacuation. He tells her not to bother with the families living there legally, as they believe they will be protected forever by the Ausweis, the working papers that allowed them to avoid deportation the first time around. He promises to introduce her to Sewer Man, a smuggler the ZOB has themselves been using for months. At the end of October, the ZOB issues a proclamation against various organizations, convicting them of crimes against the Jewish people. The day before, they had shot the Commander of the Jewish Police down in the street.

In November, a coworker, Stefania, passes Irena a note informing her that she knows what Irena is doing and knows how to help. Stefania informs Irena of ZEGOTA, a new organization with money available to help. Later, Irena meets with Sewer Man to evacuate five children. Although he isn’t happy to take five children, he nevertheless only charges 50 zloty—the amount Adam claimed he would charge per child—for all five, reasoning, with a smile, that “[t]hey’re small” (193). Irena later receives a phone call from Sister Maria Ena confirming their arrival.