The Courageous Heart of Irena Sendler

By Fran Austin

On April 16, 2015, the Westlake Village Cinema presented, in limited release, a Yom Hashoa Film, The Courageous Heart of Irena Sendler, starring Anna Paquin, Gorin Visnjic, and Marica Gay Harden.

The event was sponsored by the Conejo Jewish Academy.

The film details the story of Irena Sendler (Sendlerowa), a Polish social worker during the years of Poland’s Nazi occupation. Sendler saved some 2,500 Jewish children by smuggling them out of the Warsaw Ghetto, and giving them false identities, while storing their true identities in jars buried under an apple tree. Through dank sewers and often in makeshift “toolboxes”, she lead children, from infancy through preteen years, to a place of safety by arduous sacrifice, a network of friends, and most of all by valor and courage.

Rebecca Windheim in The Courageous Heart of Irena Sendler

Visual detail of life in the Jewish ghetto is portrayed in faded colort, and mostly black barbed wire “décor”, aptly reflecting the horror of daily Jewish life. The haunted eyes of children, stricken countenances of those forced into hiding behind walls and makeshift contrivances, the endless tears, beggar the question, “Why?” Against the backdrop of the hideous clamor of Nazi boots in lockstep, continued the barely audible refrain, “They MEAN what they say.”

The story of Irena Sendler is one of moral courage in face of overwhelming evil and depravity. Her rescue efforts began in 1939 as German tanks rolled in to announce WWII. They continued in 1940 when the Warsaw Ghetto was established, and accelerated through to her 1943 capture by the Gestapo.  She was tortured “almost” death. Aspects of her later life included going into hiding for much of the rest of the war.

One particularly poignant scene takes place as the ghetto Jews were loaded onto the cattle cars that transported them to the Treblinka Extermination Camp. A young boy who had been living on the streets, foraging for food for Jews officially allotted only 300 calories daily, was captured along with his father, and herded onto the death camp cattle train. His dad, wearing the blue Jewish-starred white armband, possibly of the Judenrat (Jewish Council), shouted plaintively and to no avail, “But we are the PROTECTED class!” He then proceeded to pound through the floorboards with only his fists until a hole was established large enough to push his sobbing, begging, “I love you, father; come with me,” son through and onto the train tracks with instructions on to how to land and survive.

A vignette at the end of the film shows the aged Sendler as she speaks about her story. Irena died in 2008 at the age of 98, but not before her story was brought to worldwide attention by four Kansas high school girls in their National History Day Project.  She was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize in 2007.

Prior to the film’s showing, which commemorated “70 years after the Holocaust”, a Conejo Academy Rabbi offered some insight and wisdom using Hebrew words that loosely translate to, “ALWAYS remember.  NEVER forget.” This was followed by a candle-lighting ceremony in memory of the “six million” led by a Holocaust survivor.

“Homo homini lupus.” Without God, “man is a wolf to man.” Hitler, himself, said, “I want to raise a generation of young people devoid of conscience — imperious, relentless, and cruel.”

As we in America (and the world at large) forge on in apathy, complacency, and hardness of heart, having no solid moral truth on which to stand, no “eyes to see, ears to hear” the crude, cruel deception of our day, calling “evil good and good evil”, we plunge like lemmings off our cliff of self-destruction, as in the days of Hitler, as in the days of Noah.

Have we learned the lessons of history? Hardly.

===============================================

Fran Austin is a former teacher living in Westlake Village. Being of Russian Jewish ancestry. Mrs. Austin underscores the importance of America’s being defined as a “Judeo-Christian Nation” and “One Nation Under God”.  She has personally realized the vital unity of the “born-again” experience for “Whosoever will…” to return to these true roots and away from the indoctrinated secularism intended to destroy our Constitutional liberties, especially our freedom to worship God.

Get Citizensjournal.us Headlines free  SUBSCRIPTION. Keep us publishing – DONATE

 *Scroll down to post a comment