Three women who took a stand

What do a Catholic nun, an outspoken anti-Semitic author and a social worker who protested the segregation of the Jews have in common?
They all worked together with the Zegota, the Polish underground organization of 25 that saved the lives of 2,500 Jewish children by smuggling them out of the Nazi-established Jewish ghetto in Warsaw.
Although social worker Irena Sendler’s father died before her eighth birthday, he impacted her life. A physician and one of the first Polish Socialists, Stanislaw Krzyzanowski raised Sendler to respect and love people regardless of their ethnicity or social status. Many of his patients were poor Jews. While other doctors left the city during an outbreak of typhus in 1917, he stayed to treat all of his patients – and died of typhus himself.
According to the Jewish website aish.com “Irena (a Catholic) had strong loyalties towards Jews – an unfavorable position in a country that was strongly anti-Semitic. In the 1930s, at Warsaw University … Jews were forced to sit separately from ‘Aryan’ students. One day, Irena went to sit on the Jewish side of the room. When the teacher told her to move back to her side of the room, she answered, ‘I’m Jewish today.’”
For her stand, the school expelled her and refused to allow her to return for three years.
Sendler became a social worker. The first three years of the war, she created false documents for Jews and smuggled in food, medicine and clothing to the ghetto in Warsaw where 5,000 Jews died each month.
“In 1942, the underground resistance put Sendler in charge of the Children’s Division of Zegota. She led her team of 25 in an organized effort to smuggle out as many children as possible from the Ghetto before the Nazi regime enforced their final liquidation. Ten members smuggled children out, ten found families to take the children, and five obtained false documents.
“Small children were sedated to keep them from crying, then hidden inside sacks, boxes, body bags or coffins. Older children who could pretend to be ill were taken out in ambulances. Many were smuggled through sewers or underground tunnels, or taken through an old courthouse or church next to the Ghetto,” according to aish.com.
Thanks to Sendler and the Zegota, more than 2,500 Jewish children survived the war. Sendler planned to re-unite them with their families. To that end she kept records of the children, their parents and their placements inside glass jars buried in the yard. However, few children re-united with their families. Most of their parents and other relatives had died in the gas chambers or concentration camps.
In October 1943, the Nazis discovered Sendler’s activities. They arrested, imprisoned and tortured her, causing permanent damage. Condemned to the firing squad, the Zegota bribed a guard to help her escape and to record that she had been executed. She hid for the rest of the war, helping where she could, but by then the Jewish ghetto had been eliminated.
A nationally renowned historical writer, an outspoken anti-Semite and a leader in several Polish underground activities during the war, Kossak-Szczucka protested the actions against the Jews. “Those who are silent in the face of murder become accomplices to the crime,” she wrote. “We are required by God to protest. God who forbids us to kill. We are required by our Christian consciousness. Every human being has the right to be loved by his fellow men. The blood of the defenseless cries to heaven for revenge.” (Wikipedia)
Her vivid descriptions of what was happening and what would happen led to the formation of the Provisional Committee to Aid Jews, which precipitated the formation of the Zegota with one purpose – to save Polish Jews from the Nazis death sentence.
Kossak-Szczucka said that Poland could not benefit from German cruelties and that the future of a free Poland could not be combined with the acceptance of this grief of their fellow citizens. She actively participated in the practical work of saving the lives of the Jews, for which she was arrested. She survived her imprisonment in Auschwitz.
Matylda Getter, as the head of the Franciscan Sisters of the Family of Mary in Warsaw and a social worker in pre-war Poland, insisted that she would shelter and house as many Jewish children as needed shelter. Her convent housed 250 to 500 children.
“You could not refuse to help children facing certain death,” Getter said to explain her actions (Wikipedia).
After the war under the Communist regime, the reports of these women’s activities were repressed. After the fall of Communism, recognition came slowly,  first with a plaque honoring the efforts of the underground.
Then in 2009 Poland issued a commemorative coin featuring Sendler, Getter and Kossak-Szczucka – a year after the last of the three, Sendler, died at the age of 98.
Today we honor these long unrecognized women who worked to save the lives that those in power did not value.
Today, we need more women like these three, women who will speak out in light of today’s silent holocaust against the unborn, offer housing to the mothers and their unborn children. We need women who will advocate for life and the abolishment of such grief in a free country. We need women who will not stand silent in the face of murder.
Be like Getter, do not refuse to help children facing certain death.