Irena Sendler - HMD Lesson 2

Presentation script

Slide 1 - blank slide. Introduction to the lesson

This lesson will explore the importance of individual action, how one person can make a difference if they take action, based on their values, through one example, chosen from many.

We’ll consider the choice between being a ‘bystander’ or an ‘up-stander’

Whilst some people actively supported or helped state policies of persecution, the vast majority stood by silently.

At best - afraid to speak out because of the risk to them and their families.

At worst – indifferent to what was happening to others.

Bystanders enabled the Holocaust and other genocides to happen.

Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel wrote powerfully about the impact of bystanders:

“I swore never to be silent whenever and wherever human beings endure suffering and humiliation. We must always take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented.”

We’re going to learn about one up-stander whose values were so powerful that she lived, and risked her life, for them.

She was not a Jew, not a Roma or Sinti, not gay or disabled.

She could have chosen the path so very many did, to keep herself safe,

     but THAT WAS NOT HER CHOICE.

She chose to be an up-stander.

She chose to live by her values that every life was important, that everyone was worth saving, no matter what the risk.

Her name was Irena Sendler.

Slide 2 - Identity Card

Irena Sendler, born in 1910, was raised by her Catholic parents to respect and love all people, regardless of their ethnicity or status. Her father was the doctor to a poor Jewish community near Warsaw, the capital of Poland, treating their illnesses, including Typhus, a highly contagious and deadly disease. He died of Typhus when Irena was 7 and the local Jewish community supported the family, who were very grateful.  Because of her strong bond of friendship with the Jewish community, Irena learnt to speak Yiddish, a skill that was to prove very important in her later work.

Slide 3 - “if you see someone drowning”

Irena inherited her father’s compassionate nature. She was incapable of ignoring injustice and stood up against all forms of discrimination. She remembered what her parents had taught her.

“If you see someone drowning, you must try to rescue them, even if you cannot swim yourself.”

WHAT DO YOU THINK THAT MEANS - think and share

He taught her about making choices in her life to help others, to rescue those in danger, to never be a bystander, always an up-stander in the face of injustice or discrimination.

Slide 4 - Warsaw Ghetto

The choices the Nazis made were very different. They decided that anyone who was different should not live together, should not be treated with respect. In 1939, after taking over Austria in ’38, they invaded first Czechoslovakia, then Poland. After Nazi troops marched into Warsaw, they began forcing the Jewish population to move into a ghetto (a confined, severely over-populated area of the city, where there were many diseases including Typhus, which was highly contagious). 

Slide 5 - Resistance

By this time, Irena was a Social Worker in Warsaw. Non-Jews were forbidden by the Nazis to help the Jews - to do so could mean severe punishment or even death for the person and their family. However, because the Nazis were fearful of typhus crossing into the non-Jewish side of Warsaw, Irena was able to obtain a Health Inspector pass, which allowed her to go into the ghetto. She became a leader in the resistance, (called Zegota), coordinating a network of workers.

Slide 6- Jewish children in the Ghetto

In the Ghetto conditions were terrible. There wasn’t enough food, medicine or clothing, no heating and terrible overcrowding.

Irena’s Health Inspector pass meant she could help and her fluent Yiddish, learnt in her childhood, helped her win trust.  She brought food, medicine, clothes, but this wasn’t enough. By this time, the deportations to the Death Camps had started and she decided to rescue as many children as she could.

WHY THE CHILDREN? Think, pair, share

Answers could include –

The young children were easier to hide and would not remember or reveal their real identity.

She knew they had no chance of survival if they stayed.

She later said that the parents who handed over their children were the real heroes. How difficult it must have been to give your child to strangers, knowing you were unlikely to ever see them again. The heartache of these families haunted her for the rest of her life.

Slide 7- How did she do it?

She smuggled children out of the ghetto through sewers, hidden in stretchers with dead bodies, in boxes with air holes, in wagons, smuggled into a building through one entrance to leave with a “new family” by another door. Each time a child was moved, it was very dangerous for Irena and her colleagues. They could be arrested, imprisoned, killed.

The new identities were as Catholic children with new names, parents, place and date of birth. They were placed in homes, orphanages and convents, taught to speak Polish and to say Catholic prayers.

Irena wrote their real identity together with their new one, in coded form and buried them in jars in a garden.

Irena hoped that, one day, the children could be told who they really were and even, possibly, be reunited with family members.  Sadly, this only happened for a very, very few of them. Tragically nearly all the children’s parents were murdered.

Slide 8- picture of Elzbieta Ficowska

Meet Elzunia Koppel, whose name was changed to Elzbieta, and who was smuggled out from the Warsaw Ghetto aged only 6 months, sedated in a wooden case with air holes. In the box with her was this silver spoon with her name and date of birth. She is still alive, in Warsaw, due to Irena Sendler.

Sadly, in October 1943, Irena was betrayed, the Gestapo raided her apartment, arrested and imprisoned her. She was tortured but never revealed any of her secrets. On the morning that she was to be executed, a bribed Gestapo officer helped her escape and she spent the rest of the war in hiding.

Slide 9- Righteous among the nations

Her story was largely forgotten, although, in 1964, an olive tree was planted in her honour at Yad VaShem, the Holocaust Museum in Jerusalem.

In 1999 her story came to light once again, when several students at a High School in Kansas began research about her after they found a brief reference to her in a US News and World Report entitled ‘The Other Schindlers.” They were moved by what they discovered and decided to write a play about her entitled’A Life in a Jar’. They eventually found out that she was still alive and living in obscurity in Warsaw, and wrote to her. They were amazed when she wrote back, delighted to have been ‘found’. The four students and their teacher visited her in May 2001 and continued their friendship until she died, aged 98, in May 2008. Through the students and their play her story spread and she was honoured as a Polish National Hero in 2018.

Slide 10 - statue in Newark

And here, in England, Irena Sendler was honoured by a statue in Newark, Nottinghamshire June 2021.

Slide 11 - people in the Holocaust

We are now going to focus, not on the huge numbers who suffered but on just one person, just as Irena did, again and again. You are going to do your own creative imagining of a person whose life might have been lost, ruined or torn apart during the Holocaust. They might be a Jew, Roma or Sinti, gay, disabled, or a resister to Nazi ideology.

Slide 12-Life in a jar

We are going to think about that person and what their life might have been like, where they lived and how they lived. What possessions were important to them. And especially what you think they might have taken with them when they had to leave their homes and everything else behind.  

We are going to ask you to imagine what their hopes and dreams for their future lives might have been. What did they dream of being able to do in the future when the terrible times were over? What message might they have had for us, here and now, if their voice were heard?

This is an activity for each of you as an individual to do. You do not need to share it with anyone else and we are certainly not worried about your spellings or handwriting.

(Before we start, just take a moment to think about yourself, in this entirely different situation and time. Who do you love? What’s your home like? Your friends? Things you like to do? Your treasured possessions? Your hope and dreams?)

Slide 13 - your person’s name and age

Now we are each of us going to imagine another person and create who they might have been.

Firstly choose a name and age for your person. Are they an adult, child, teenager?

LABEL YOUR JAR WITH THEIR NAME AND AGE 

Slide 14 - Home Life

You are putting together a story and the next stage is to WRITE ON YOUR FIRST SLIP OF PAPER.

Where do they live - which European country (Germany, Poland, France, Holland, Hungary, Italy, Greece)

Do they live in the countryside, a town, in a house or a flat?

What do they love about their home? Is it the view from the window, a tree in the garden?

Who is in their family.  Who are the people they live with? 

Slide15- possessions

Your next slip of paper is for treasured possessions. Remember this is a person in the 1940’s, so no modern technology. What might they have tried to take with them, what could they carry, what might have been most important to them? WRITE ON YOUR NEXT SLIP OF PAPER, one or two possessions they might have treasured. 

Slide 16 - Hopes and Dreams

Your last piece of paper is for their hopes and dreams. What might they have wanted for their future, what mattered most to them? What message might they have wanted to send to us, had their voice not been silenced? What questions would we have liked them to answer, had we had the opportunity to ask them? WRITE DOWN THEIR HOPES AND DREAMS MESSAGE.

NOW PUT ALL YOUR SLIPS OF PAPER IN YOUR JAR AND SEAL IT.

In front of you now is the story of a person you created.

Put your jar together with all/a few other jars and look at them together.

WHAT DO YOU NOTICE - think, pair share

What’s the same and different, size, shape, way the papers are inside them? Each one is unique and special. What might be written on them, who might they represent?

WRITING YOUR MESSAGE

You are now going to have a couple of minutes to write your own short message on a post it note to your friends, school and to the world to say what positive messages you have taken from this workshop.

Then hand it in to your teacher.

We learnt from the courage of Irena Sendler, her commitment to saving a child, and another child, and another child

We then thought, each of us on our own, of a person who might have lived and suffered at that time.

End the lesson with one of the following:

a moment of silence to reflect

an opportunity for students to share their thoughts

by reading some of the post it notes.

You might want to end with a poem. There are a few on our website.