#STACKS N CRACKS CALENDAR GIRLS ARCHIVE#
#STACKS N CRACKS CALENDAR GIRLS CODE#
#STACKS N CRACKS CALENDAR GIRLS CRACK#

Traveling out of the country for the first time (the first time on a plane for one of them), the girls finally met Sendler at her Warsaw home in 2001. The three students made plans to travel to Poland and meet Sendler, first trying to raise money through candy sales, until philanthropists and Holocaust survivors from the Kansas City Jewish community stepped in to help cover the trip. The foundation then put them in touch with Sendler. Soon after, they received a letter from the foundation, saying that Sendler was alive! She was in her nineties and living in poverty with her daughter-in-law in Warsaw.

Logically, they began searching cemetery records and reached out to the Jewish Foundation for the Righteous, seeking information about where she might be buried. The teens read that Irena had been arrested in 1943 by the Gestapo and tortured in Pawiak Prison, the most notorious prison in the ghetto, from which almost no one escaped. The title, Life in a Jar, refers to the lists Sendler buried. It retold, in dramatic form, the emotional story of Sendler knocking on ghetto doors and asking Jewish parents to give up their children to save them. News and World Report article entitled “The Other Schindlers.” Sendler’s story inspired their NHD project: a play they wrote and performed called Life in a Jar. The article explained that, in 1999, while planning a National History Day project, they found a brief reference to Sendler in a U.S. On my desk someone had left a copy of the Ladies Home Journal, opened to an article, “The Woman Who Loved Children.” It was about Irena Sendler and three Kansas teens who uncovered her story. Then, in February 2004, I came into my office one night to see a sick child.

#STACKS N CRACKS CALENDAR GIRLS ARCHIVE#

World History Archive / Alamy Stock Photo I kept this calendar in a file labeled “Interesting Stuff.” And there it sat for almost three years. They had her birth year wrong (it was 1910, I later found out), and they didn’t know if she was still alive. Even at the USHMM, the preeminent scholars of the Holocaust didn’t know much about Sendler. How could I not know Irena Sendler’s story? Everybody knows Oskar Schindler, who rescued 1,100 Jews from a German concentration camp in Poland and whose story was told in the Steven Spielberg film Schindler’s List. She assumed a new identity and continued her work for Zegota. Arrested by the Gestapo in the fall of 1943, Sendlerowa was sentenced to death.

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Hiding them in orphanages, convents, schools, hospitals, and private homes, she provided each child with a new identity, carefully recording in code their Jewish names and placements so that surviving relatives could find them after the war. Irena Sendlerowa, (1916–UNKNOWN) As head of the children’s division of Zegota, the Polish underground Council for Aid to Jews, social worker Irena Sendlerowa (code name “Jolanta”) helped smuggle more than 2,500 Jewish children out of the Warsaw ghetto. I read the short paragraph below the photo: It was the photo that stopped me-a young Irena Sendler, twenty-nine years old, who looked a lot like my niece. As I quickly flipped through, I was brought up short by the November entry. Each year I send a contribution, and they send me a calendar highlighting 12 monthly Holocaust heroes. Everything had about three seconds to be kept, filed, recycled, or thrown away. This was before the electronic health record, and I daily triaged a prodigious stack of paper.

My first brush with this story came in the winter of 2001, in my Middlebury, Vermont, pediatric office, while going through my mail.

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Three teenagers from rural Kansas helped crack open the silence about the Holocaust in Poland. Liz, Megan, and Sabrina, who began as students of history for a National History Day competition, became recorders of history, championing Sendler’s legacy in Poland, the U.S., and around the world. She would have remained an unsung hero were it not for three teenage American girls who discovered her forgotten story 60 years later. Almost no one knew of Sendler and her heroism. Sendler and others who rescued Jews during the war kept silent. They were harassed, interrogated, imprisoned, and even executed. After the war, Poland’s Communist government persecuted members of Poland’s wartime resistance, Zegota, of which Sendler was a part.

Stacks n cracks calendar girls