To study history is to read about bad things and bad people, largely. A policeman friend of mine once said that what depressed him about his job was that he pretty much only met two kinds of people at work: criminals and victims, since happy people rarely have any contact with the police. History is often the story of events that mixed things up, caused a commotion, affected the course of events. Often those are bad things, often caused by bad people.

But there are good people and good things. All of the little stories of history, which we tell here at WTH, add up to be the Big Story of our world which I believe has much good in it. The little stories of good are important, because they are salt and light in our world.

This is one of those stories...

When World War II broke out, Irena Sendler was a 29-year-old social worker, employed by the Welfare Department of the Warsaw municipality. After the German occupation, the department continued to take care of the great number of poor and dispossessed people in the city. Irena Sendler took advantage of her job in order to help the Jews, however this became practically impossible once the ghetto was sealed off in November 1940. Close to 400,000 people had been driven into the small area that had been allocated to the ghetto, and their situation soon deteriorated. The poor hygienic conditions in the crowded ghetto, the lack of food and medical supplies resulted in epidemics and high death rates. Irena Sendler, at great personal danger, devised means to get into the ghetto and help the dying Jews. She managed to obtain a permit from the municipality that enabled her to enter the ghetto to inspect the sanitary conditions. Once inside the ghetto, she established contact with activists of the Jewish welfare organization and began to help them. She helped smuggle Jews out of the ghetto to the Aryan side and helped set up hiding places for them. 

Most people know the story of Oscar Schindler’s saving of almost 1,200 Jews in Poland because of the movie Schindler’s List. But Irena Sendler personally helped rescue over 2,500 Jewish children from the hell of the Warsaw Ghetto. Even before she started rescuing the children in 1940, when the Nazis invaded Poland in 1939, she and the resistance group she worked with created more than 3,000 false travel documents to enable Jewish families to escape the country as the oppression began.

Grace, danger, grace:

In 1943, Sendler was arrested by the Gestapo, severely tortured, and sentenced to death. Żegota saved her by bribing the German guards on the way to her execution. She was left in the woods, unconscious and with broken arms and legs. 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 began an attempt to find the children and return them to living parents. However, almost all the children's parents had died at the Treblinka extermination camp.

She never stopped giving, never stopped being salt and light in this world. Eventually she was recognized for it by all kinds of organizations and governments. Pope John Paul II sent her a personal letter thanking her. In 2007 the Polish Senate honored her and Polish President Lech Kaczynski stated that she "can be justly named for the Nobel Peace Prize." At 97 years old she was too old to leave her nursing home to attend the ceremony, but she sent this message to the parliament, “Every child saved with my help is the justification of my existence on this Earth, and not a title to glory.”

I write this post with tears in my eyes for the thousands, millions of little stories of selfless grace, genuine humility and enormous courage that contribute to what Augustine called, “The City of God.” Hebrews 11:13-14 says of people like this, “All these people were still living by faith when they died. They did not receive the things promised; they only saw them and welcomed them from a distance. And they admitted that they were aliens and strangers on earth. People who say such things show that they are looking for a country of their own.”

Irena Sendler passed into that glory three days ago, on May 12, 2008 at the age of 98. As I look at her smiling face in this picture I think about all the elderly people I meet, people who look like this, and I wonder about the little stories in their lives that add up to the Big Story of our world. Few lives have contributed to the best part of that Big Story like hers.