photo Reuters
Hundreds of friends and admirers of Irena Sendler have attended a memorial and funeral service and to honor the Polish social worker who helped to save nearly 2,500 Jewish children during the Holocaust. Sendler, who died on Monday at the age of 98, was a social worker with the city's welfare department when Germany invaded Poland in September 1939. Warsaw's Jews were forced into a walled-off ghetto. Sendler, a Catholic, undertook risky rescues to save the ghetto's children, smuggling them out by ambulance and in trams, some of the smaller one wrapped up as packages.
On Thursday, a priest led a mass at Warsaw's St. Boromeusz church with Sendler's daughter, Janina Zgrzembska, and Elzbieta Ficowska, one of the children Sendler saved from the ghetto. Pallbearers carried Sendler's coffin through the historic Powazki cemetery. More than 40 children from the newly named Irena Sendler Middle School in the capital's Praga neighborhood looked on, each holding a yellow tulip.
"Meeting her was like touching the wing of an angel of mercy," Catholic priest Wojciech Lemanski said of Sendler at the funeral mass. "She not only did good, but also knew how to awake this ability in others. She went from home to home looking for those who needed help," he added.
Speaking for hundreds of others like him, Michal Glowinski said that as a child Sendler took him "beyond the ghetto walls – out of hell – to shelter in a place giving hope for salvation." Poland's president Lech Kaczynski, currently visiting Israel, urged all schools across Poland to observe a minute's silence in Sendler's honor.
Israel's former ambassador to Poland, Shevah Weiss, Poland's chief rabbi Michael Schudrich, the speaker of the Polish parliament, Bronislaw Komorowski, and deputy prime minister Wojciech Schetyna were also present at the ceremony. "Poland, the Jewish people, the world has lost a person who simply fought her whole life for what it means to help another person, fought for never being indifferent, for never dividing humanity but bringing it together," Schudrich told the ‘Reuters’ news agency at the funeral.
World Jewish Congress president Ronald Lauder said in a statement: “Irena Sendler was incredibly brave. She will always have a special place in the hearts and minds of Jews around the world. It is important that future generations remember her as a beacon of humanity and hope in a sea of misery and despair.”
