1. Quotes
  2. Authors
  3. Irena Sendler

Irena Sendler Quotes

Irena Stanisława Sendler , also referred to as Irena Sendlerowa in Poland, nom de guerre "Jolanta" , was a Polish humanitarian, social worker, and nurse who served in the Polish Underground Resistance during World War II in German-occupied Warsaw. From October 1943 she was head of the children's section of Żegota, the Polish Council to Aid Jews .In the 1930s, Sendler conducted her social work as one of the activists connected to the Free Polish University. From 1935 to October 1943, she worked for the Department of Social Welfare and Public Health of the City of Warsaw. She also pursued informal, and during the war conspiratorial activities, such as rescuing Jews, primarily as part of the network of workers and volunteers from that department, mostly women. Sendler participated, with dozens of others, in smuggling Jewish children out of the Warsaw Ghetto and then providing them with false identity documents and shelter with willing Polish families or in orphanages and other care facilities, including Catholic nun convents, saving those children from the Holocaust.The German occupiers suspected Sendler's involvement in the Polish Underground and in October 1943 she was arrested by the Gestapo, but she managed to hide the list of the names and locations of the rescued Jewish children, preventing this information from falling into the hands of the Gestapo. Withstanding torture and imprisonment, Sendler never revealed anything about her work or the location of the saved children. She was sentenced to death but narrowly escaped on the day of her scheduled execution, after Żegota bribed German officials to obtain her release.

In post-war communist Poland, Sendler continued her social activism but also pursued a government career. In 1965, she was recognised by the State of Israel as Righteous Among the Nations. Among the many decorations Sendler received were the Gold Cross of Merit granted her in 1946 for the saving of Jews and the Order of the White Eagle, Poland's highest honour, awarded late in Sendler's life for her wartime humanitarian efforts. Wikipedia  

✵ 15. February 1910 – 12. May 2008
Irena Sendler photo
Irena Sendler: 7   quotes 21   likes

Famous Irena Sendler Quotes

“I was brought up to believe that a person must be rescued when drowning, regardless of religion and nationality.”

Irena Sendler

As quoted in "Holocaust heroine's survival tale" by Adam Easton in BBC News (3 March 2005) http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/4314145.stm

“I continue to have pangs of conscience that I did so little.”

Irena Sendler

As quoted in "Holocaust heroine's survival tale" by Adam Easton in BBC News (3 March 2005)
Context: Let me stress most emphatically that we who were rescuing children are not some kind of heroes. Indeed, that term irritates me greatly. The opposite is true. I continue to have pangs of conscience that I did so little.

“Heroes do extraordinary things. What I did was not an extraordinary thing. It was normal.”

Irena Sendler

Quoted in "Irena Sendlerowa: Warsaw social worker who rescued thousands from the Jewish ghetto" by Rupert Cornwell in The Independent (14 May 2008)

“I still carry the marks on my body of what those "German supermen" did to me then.”

Irena Sendler

Referring to Nazi doctrines that German "Aryans" were a "master-race" of "supermen", as quoted in "Holocaust heroine's survival tale" by Adam Easton in BBC News (3 March 2005)
Context: I still carry the marks on my body of what those "German supermen" did to me then. I was sentenced to death.

“I am the only person still alive of that rescuing group but I want everyone to know that, while I was coordinating our efforts, we were about twenty to twenty five people. I did not do it alone.”

Irena Sendler

Quoted in "The Long Path to Irena Sendler - Mother of the Holocaust Children" http://www.socwork.net/2006/1/historicalportraits/wieler, by Joachim Wieler Social Work & Society, vol. 4 (2006)

“Every child saved with my help and the help of all the wonderful secret messengers, who today are no longer living, is the justification of my existence on this earth, and not a title to glory.”

Irena Sendler

Letter to the Polish Senate (2007), quoted in "Irena Sendler, Lifeline to Young Jews, Is Dead at 98" http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/13/world/europe/13sendler.html?em&ex=1210824000&en=cecafcbe4079750b&ei=5087%0A by Dennis Hevesi in The New York Times (13 May 2008)

“Over a half-century has passed since the hell of the Holocaust, but its spectre still hangs over the world and doesn’t allow us to forget.”

Irena Sendler

Letter to the Polish Senate (2007), quoted in "Irena Sendler: An Unsung Heroine" http://www.auschwitz.dk/Sendler.htm by Louis Bülow (2007)

Similar authors

Stanisław Jerzy Lec photo
Stanisław Jerzy Lec 28
Polish writer
Anne Frank photo
Anne Frank 110
victim of the Holocaust and author of a diary
Janusz Korczak photo
Janusz Korczak 3
Polish physician and writer
Isaac Bashevis Singer photo
Isaac Bashevis Singer 39
Polish-born Jewish-American author
Wisława Szymborska photo
Wisława Szymborska 92
Polish writer
Viktor E. Frankl photo
Viktor E. Frankl 64
Austrian neurologist and psychiatrist, and Holocaust surviv…
Czeslaw Milosz photo
Czeslaw Milosz 106
Polish, poet, diplomat, prosaist, writer, and translator
Marie Curie photo
Marie Curie 21
French-Polish physicist and chemist
Rosa Luxemburg photo
Rosa Luxemburg 56
Polish Marxist theorist, socialist philosopher, and revolut…
Imre Kertész photo
Imre Kertész 61
Hungarian writer