A forged ID, a nurse’s armband, and a will that never broke. We share the astonishing real story of Irena Sendler, the Polish social worker who smuggled 2,500 Jewish children out of the Warsaw Ghetto and buried their true names in glass jars beneath an apple tree. From her father’s dying lesson—“jump in to save the drowning”—to her cool defiance at university benches, Irena learned early that compassion is a verb. When the ghetto sealed and starvation spread, she turned bureaucracy into a shield: epidemic passes, forged papers, and a rescue network that moved babies in crates and older kids through churches and courthouses that straddled the wall.

We walk through the logistics and the heartbreak: convincing parents to let children go with no guarantee of reunion, training kids to pass as Catholic under a guard’s questions, and using an ambulance dog to drown out a baby’s cry at a checkpoint. The jars of names become a second rescue, a promise that identity and lineage would endure even if families could not. Captured and tortured in 1943, Irena refused to betray anyone and faced a firing squad—until a bribed guard wrote her down as executed and slipped her into hiding. After the war, she unearthed the jars and tried to reconnect survivors, even as communist Poland buried her story for decades.

The twist arrives from an unlikely place: three Kansas students who unearthed a single line about Irena and turned it into Life in a Jar, a school play that helped restore her legacy. We reflect on late recognition, the courage of ordinary families and nuns who hid children at mortal risk, and why small acts—papers, passes, doors held open—can bend history. If you’re drawn to hidden World War II stories, the Warsaw Ghetto, Holocaust rescue, and the power of names and memory, this conversation will stay with you long after it ends.

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Yad Vashem: The World Holocaust Remembrance Center
https://www.yadvashem.org/righteous/stories/sendler.html

Life in a Jar Foundation (by the Kansas students who rediscovered her story)
https://www.irenasendler.org

United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM) – Irena Sendler
https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/irena-sendler

Chabad.org: Irena Sendler: The Woman Who Saved 2,500 Children
https://www.chabad.org/library/article_cdo/aid/1079233/jewish/Irena-Sendler.htm

Aish.com: Remembering Irena Sendler
https://aish.com/irena-sendler-the-unsung-hero-of-the-holocaust/

PBS / Jewish Partisan Educational Foundation
https://www.jewishpartisans.org/partisans/irena-sendler

The Guardian obituary (2008)
https://www.

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