Posts Tagged ‘Irena Sendler’

Sendler at the time of her interviews with Skinner. She died in 2008.

Today is the 75th anniversary of the beginning of the Warsaw Uprising in 1944. If you want to see Mikołaj Kaczmarek’s remarkable new “colorizing” of photos from the year-long Polish struggle that resulted in the defeat and destruction of Poland’s capital, go here. 

‘I was in shock – the past just came right out at me.” (Photo Mikołaj Kaczmarek)

According to Kaczmarek, “The first photo I tried was the girl next to a grave. When I finished, I was in shock – the past just came right out at me.” 

“They lived in a time of apocalypse and whether they wanted to or not they had to fight and they often died,” he said. “The colorization made me realize that they were people just like us, they just happened to live at that time.”

Meanwhile, we haven’t written for some time about Mary Skinner, the filmmaker who made In the Name of Their Mothers, about Holocaust heroine Irena Sendler‘s efforts that saved 2,500 children from the Warsaw Ghetto (see here and here and here and here). Below, an excerpt from Skinner’s interviews with Sendler in Warsaw, 2004. (Sendler died at 98 in 2008), where she describes living through the Warsaw Uprising:

“The Warsaw Uprising is in progress. I am in this Red Cross hospital but, in fact, it is a Home Army hospital. There are about a hundred patients. This is the end of August, and we have nothing to eat. One of the patients is a servant from a landowner’s family. She tells the hospital director that in the house opposite – which is destroyed, but the basement is intact – her employers left behind an entire basement full of food. Hams and sausages, everything. So we walk into this basement. And we’re loading sacks full of all this food – and in walks a German. He was startled to see us and we were alarmed to see him. His first reaction was to jab my leg with his bayonet. I have a scar on my leg to this day.

So he was startled. We were, too. He asks us what are we doing here and we tell him in our broken German that we came to pick up the food. He stood there, and he saw us behaving in a normal way. He tells us that he is in search of some civilian clothing. “I‘ve had enough of this killing. It has been five years now and I just want to get out of this and I’m looking for some civilian clothing.” So the servant says that her employers, before they left, had packed a suitcase full of good clothes. “So get out of your uniform and we’ll have you dressed.” So this German takes his clothes off and we dress him from head to toe in a very elegant suit and we tell him, “Just run away and stop all this killing and don’t kill anymore.” He said, “I’ve been killing for five or six years now. I have a wife and children and the war is almost over. I’ve had enough.” So we said, “Just run away and quit killing.”

And so he did.

A promise is a promise. We don’t usually do “young adult” fiction here at the Book Haven, but in this case I make an exception – a duty as well as a pleasure. Seven years ago, over bronowicka wegetariań„ska and some very good wine and vodka at Pod Baranem in Kraków (I later learned it was one of Czesław Miłosz‘s favorite restaurants in that wondrous city),  I heard the story of Irena Sendler, who had died a few months before in 2008. It was an extraordinary tale told late in the evening by her friend and Holocaust survivor Lili Pohlmann of the city’s Judaica Foundation.

Now the story is well known, but back then it wasn’t. I was skeptical of Lili’s claims of her close friend who had saved thousands of Jewish children from the Warsaw Ghetto. Why had I never heard of her? I went back to my Kraków apartment and googled, and confirmed Lili’s account – since Sendler was a Polish patriot, the Soviet authorities had had an interest in suppressing the story, which became known only after 1989. I resolved pretty much then and there to do what I could to share the history, as I have done here and here and here and here and here, and a few other places as well. So how could a not cover Angela Cerrito‘s well-researched The Safest Lie when the publisher, New York’s Holiday House, sent it to me?

The fictional story is told from the point of view of one of Sendler’s hidden children, nine-year-old Anna Bauman. When she hears her new, assigned name, Anna Karlowska, she says, “The words are heavy and far away, like a stone thrown so far out into the lake that it is impossible to hear the splash.”

Sendler herself makes two brief appearances in the book under the code name she used, “Jolanta.” Her first when she makes arrangements to rescue Anna from the Warsaw Ghetto. Sendler said that, for each child saved, she needed a team of 25: 10 to smuggle children out, 10 to find families to take the children, and 5 to get false documents.The second encounter occurs when Anna is in hiding at a convent school – Sendler said not a single convent had refused to shelter a child.

In The Safest Lie, the fictional Anna overhears a conversation of an unknown woman with Sister Maria:

As I dust the first windowsill, I hear Sister Maria’s conversation through her open door.

“We heard of your capture. We even received news of your death.”

To honor her.

“In these times, one doesn’t know what to believe,” answers a woman. The voice is decisive, but so low. Someone used to talking in whispers. It’s low and rumbly, but strong. I try to slow my breathing and quiet my heart so I can hear properly. I know that voice! Jolanta? My heart drums in my ears. Could it be? 

“Perhaps the news you heard was true. Today I am Mrs. Dabrowska. Tomorrow perhaps another name. We try to be safe, though we know safety isn’t always possible.”

Oh how I wish I could run into Sister Maria’s office. I want to ask Jolanta a million questions. … Outside the door, I hear Sister Maria say, “Fifteen will help a great deal.”

“Tomorrow then,” says Mrs. Dabrowska, who sounds just like Jolanta.

I walk into the office and set my cloth on Sister Maria’s desk. I study the woman. Her hair is not like Jolanta’s, and something is different about the face. Could it really be her? The woman smiles at me. I’ve never seen Jolanta smile. “And how are you today?” She places a hand on my arm.

“Very well, thank you,” I say. The hand doesn’t feel familiar, but the woman’s yes do. Does she know me?

“Anna, please excuse us,” says Sister Maria.

I leave the room and wait at the end of the hall by the statue of Mother Maria. I pray again. Should I speak with her? Should I ask if she’s Jolanta? I wait until the lady leaves Sister Maria’s office. When I see her walking away, I decide it can’t be Jolanta. The woman drags her left leg. It looks like every step causes her pain. Not at all like Jolanta, who took short, speedy steps.

Irena Sendler had been captured, tortured, and sentenced to a firing squad by the Germans in 1943. Although they had broken her feet and legs, she escaped. She lived until April 2008.

Anyway, it’s a gift idea for the coming month. It’s a fast-paced, moving 181 pages. I had trouble putting it down.

My travels have slowed my progress into Proustitution – but I was arrested by this passage in Swann’s Way, in which Marcel Proust describes the plight of a pregnant servant girl, a verbal journey that takes him all the way to Giotto‘s frescoes in the Scrovegni Chapel of Padua.  While most who know the early 14th-century chapel, one of the masterpieces of Western art, comment on its famous Last Judgment, or the panels which narrate events in the lives of the Virgin Mary and Christ, Proust focuses on the comparatively insignificant panels on virtues and vices, which Giotto painted as if they were stone statues, a kind of ekphrasis.

Ekphrasis has its limits, however.  The passage was more insightful when I took the trouble looked up the image to compare it to Proust’s prose.  Here Proust describes the servant girl and the image of Charity:

What was more, she herself, poor girl, fattened by her pregnancy even in her face, even in her cheeks, which descended straight and square, rather resembled, in fact, those strong, mannish virgins, matrons really, in whom the virtues are personified in the Arena.  And I realize now that those Virtues and Vices of Padua resembled her in still another way. Just as the image of this girl was increased by the added symbol she carried before her belly without appearing to understand its meaning, without expressing in her face anything of its beauty and spirit, as a mere heavy burden, in the same way the powerful housewife who is represented at the Arena below the name “Caritas,” and a reproduction of whom hung on the wall of my schoolroom at Combray, embodies this virtue without seeming to suspect it, without any thought of charity seeming ever to have been capable of being expressed by her vulgar, energetic face.  Through a lovely invention of the painter, she is trampling on the treasures of the earth, but absolutely as if she were treading grapes to extract their juice or rather as she would have climbed on some sacks to raise herself up; and she holds her flaming heart out to God, or, to put it more exactly, “hands” it to him, as a cook hands a corkscrew through the vent of her cellar to someone who is asking her for it at the ground-floor window …

There must have been a good deal of reality in those Virtues and Vices of Padua, since they seemed to me as alive as the pregnant servant, and since she herself did not appear to me much less allegorical.  And perhaps this (at least apparent) nonparticipation of a personal soul in the virtue that is acting through her has also, beyond its aesthetic value, a reality that is, if not psychological, at least, as they say, physiognomical. When, later, I had occasion to meet, in the course of my life, in convents for instance, truly saintly embodiments of practical charity, they generally had the cheerful, positive, indifferent, and brusque air of a busy surgeon, the sort of face in which one can read no commiseration, no pity in the presence of human suffering, no fear of offending it, the sort which is the ungentle face, the antithetic and sublime face of true goodness.

Sounds rather like the way her friends have described Polish Holocaust heroine Irena Sendler to me.

Yayyy for Mary Skinner!  Her film about Irena Sendler, In the Name of Their Mothers, is an “official selection” at this year’s United Nations Association Film Festival (UNAFF).

Sendler is the Polish Holocaust heroine who, with her team from the clandestine organization Żegota, saved about 2,500 children from the Warsaw Ghetto in World War II.  The story has only surfaced in the post-1989 world, since Sendler’s reputation was suppressed by the Communist regime in Poland.

From 6 to 8 p.m. on Tuesday, October 23,  Skinner will host a special “behind the scenes” event at the Mid-Peninsula Media Center, 900 San Antonio Road, Palo Alto, with a photo exhibit of many never-before-seen images from the film.  Humble Moi will be “in conversation” with Mary.  (I’ve interviewed her before here and here and here and here.)  More about the UNAFF event here.  The film will begin at 9:15 p.m. at the nearby Oshman Jewish Community Center – directions here.

Here’s what philanthropist Tad Taube wrote about Sendler in the April 26, 2011, Los Angeles Jewish Journal:

“Sendler was a dedicated social worker before the war, and her wartime activities on behalf of the Jews were a logical extension of her early commitment to do what she felt was just. … Denounced to the Gestapo, arrested and tortured, Sendler was able to escape, only to be hunted down as a “dangerous communist” by extreme-right elements in the Polish underground.

“Safety eluded her even after the war, when she was arrested by the communist authorities for having been active in the general Polish underground rather than the communist one. Again imprisoned and tortured — she suffered a miscarriage — Sendler was eventually freed from prison but became a ‘nonperson’ in the eyes of the communist state. Yad Vashem remembered her, awarding her a listing in 1965, but she was otherwise surrounded by official silence, even after the communist government fell. …

“Midrash teaches that the children of Abraham, fleeing Egypt, were joined by other slaves, who wanted their freedom no less desperately. Even then, we were not alone. And throughout the ages, thanks to those whose love of freedom and their fellow human beings was more powerful than the shackles of prejudice and fear, we never really were. Nor shall we ever be.”

Trailer for the film below.  See you there!

Some time ago, I discovered the peculiar connection between Czesław Miłosz and the Franciscan priest, Father Maximilian Kolbe – I wrote about it for the Poetry Foundation here.

Kolbe had the distinction of being the only person who ever volunteered to die at Auschwitz.  This claim is not generally made for him, but my sources were good.  I visited a researcher at Auschwitz,  Piotr Lipiński, and he explained that the death camp wasn’t the sort of place that fostered altruism.  More convincingly, he explained that the Communist authorities who assumed power after the war were very eager to find someone else – someone besides a priest, that is – who had made such a terrible deal.

The Communist government was anxious to bury the stories of Polish wartime heroes – it’s one reason, for example, the name of Irena Sendler, the woman who saved 2,500 children from the Warsaw ghetto, did not become known until after 1989.  (I’ve written about her, oh, here and here and here and here and here and here.)  Or the name of Jan Karski, who received a Presidential Medal of Freedom last month.

So here’s another one to add to the list: Captain Witold Pilecki, who had the distinction of being the only known person to smuggle into Auschwitz, so he could report back to the Allies about the conditions there.  They didn’t listen.  They thought he was exaggerating.

Probosz as Pilecki

Since 1989, Poles, too, have been learning about him, thanks to a 2006 movie, The Death of Witold Pilecki, with Marek Probosz portraying the hero.  The movie, with English subtitles, hasn’t had wide circulation.  Your better chance might be a new book:  The Auschwitz Volunteer: Beyond Bravery.  It’s been published by Aquila Polonica in Los Angeles.  That means it’s probably not going to get much mainstream publicity.  (NPR did a 2010 broadcast about him – it’s here.)  This heavily illustrated, 400-page book is the first translation into English of his report.

Auschwitz, of course, was not originally a camp for Jews, but rather P.O.W.s.  Pilecki, who was one of 150,000 Polish prisoners,  was at Auschwitz from September 1940 to April 1943, and would have seen its transition before he escaped.  Rabbi Michael Schudrich, the chief rabbi of Poland, wrote the foreword to the book:  “When God created the human being, God had in mind that we should all be like Captain Witold Pilecki, of blessed memory. May the life of Witold Pilecki inspire us all to do one more good deed, of any kind, each and every day of our lives.”

Norman Davies writes in the introduction:

Also a husband and father of two

“I myself became fully aware of the greatness of Witold Pilecki while conducting research on the Warsaw Rising of 1944.  Here was a man, who almost single-handedly had held up the German panzers on one of Warsaw’s main thoroughfares for a fortnight; using the pseudonym ‘Roman’, he then disappeared into his dugout and continued the struggle until the Rising capitulated over two months later. Only then did I realise that this was the same heroic character, who four years earlier had deliberately arranged to be arrested by the SS and be transported to Auschwitz.  In 1943, having engineered his escape, he wrote the first version of his Report on Auschwitz, which I had read and which had been the first of several attempts to inform the outside world of what was really happening. Pilecki was a Polish officer and Catholic who viewed his fight against his country’s oppression as synonymous with his patriotic and religious duty. If there was an Allied hero who deserved to be remembered and celebrated, this was a person with few peers.”

Like so many others (including Sendler) he was tortured by the Communist authorities. Pilecki was executed at their hands in 1948.  Compared with the Communists, “Auschwitz was easy,” he said after his sentence was pronounced.  His body has never been recovered.

Mary Skinner (right) with Elzbieta Ficowska, one of Sendler's rescued children

Mary Skinner was hunkered down on the West Coast, reconsidering her 20-year career in New York, when she watched her colleagues in Two World Trade Center die on 911.

According to an article in More magazine:

But as the catastrophe unfolded, Skinner’s hesitation disappeared.  “I knew friends were caught on certain floors and didn’t make it,” she says. “I felt: I need to be there right now. I’ve got to go back. I had devoted my talent, heart and brain cells to helping somebody make a little more money on currency arbitrage.  In the face of what was going on in the world, I felt like, that’s a sin.”

Two months later, Skinner boarded a plane for New York – without a job or a place to live, and for the first time in her professional life, without a plan.

She found temp office work, reconnected with old friends and took writing classes. She enrolled in a documentary filmmaking class at the New School, wanting to make a film about her Polish-born, Catholic mother, Klotylda, who was orphaned and imprisoned during World War II and cared for by strangers afterwards. Klotylda wouldn’t agree to be her subject. Haunted by her mother’s experiences, Skinner continued with her research, uncovering more stories of children saved by heroic strangers.

I interviewed Mary here and here and here and here. She eventually went to make a movie about Holocaust heroine Irena Sendler, the PBS film In the Name of Their Mothers. The article gets it wrong: Sendler didn’t save hundreds of children; she saved thousands.

Skinner’s story has a happy ending:

The film’s reception was “beyond anything I could have imagined,” Skinner says. “But I didn’t feel elated. I was frayed, out of money and scared to death.” In the US, the film was rejected from film festival competitions (a DVD release in Poland broke conventional festival rules), but won multiple European prizes.  Skinner started showing her film at churches, schools and libraries. The philanthropist Tad Taube, a major PBS donor, happened to attend one of the screenings and was so moved that he arranged for Skinner to meet with the head of programming at the local PBS affiliate. That day, Skinner came with a PowerPoint presentation, prepared to make the most important pitch of her life, but as she sat down with the station chief at a polished table surrounded by staffers, he said, “This is a powerful film.  We want to ask you if you will allow us to take it national.” In the Name of Their Mothers had its U.S. debut on Sunday May 1, 2011, Holocaust Remembrance Day.

Now that’s a story we tell here.