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Irena Sendler Facts & Worksheets

Irena Stanislawa Sendler, also known as Irena Sendlerowa in Poland, was a Polish nurse, social worker, and humanitarian who worked with the Polish Underground Resistance in German-occupied Warsaw during World War II.

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Irena Stanislawa Sendler, also known as Irena Sendlerowa in Poland, was a Polish nurse, social worker, and humanitarian who worked with the Polish Underground Resistance in German-occupied Warsaw during World War II. Beginning in October 1943, she oversaw the children’s division of Zegota, the Polish Council to Aid Jews.

See the fact file below for more information on Irena Sendler, or you can download our 21-page Irena Sendler worksheet pack to utilize within the classroom or home environment.

Key Facts & Information

LIFE BEFORE WORLD WAR II

  • On February 15, 1910, in Warsaw, Stanislaw Henryk Krzyanowski and his wife Janina Karolina welcomed their first child, Irena Sendler. On February 2, 1917, Irena was baptized Irena Stanisawa in Otwock. 
  • Irena was raised first in Otwock, a town with a Jewish community located about 24 kilometers southeast of Warsaw.
  • Her father, a humanitarian who provided free medical care to the extremely poor, including Jews, passed away in February 1917 after contracting typhus from his patients. 
  • The Jewish community offered the widow and her daughter financial support when he passed away, but Janina Krzyzanowska turned them down. She then resided in Piotrków Trybunalski and Tarczyn.
  • As a student, Sendler protested the ghetto benches system used in the 1930s at numerous Polish universities (starting in 1937 at the University of Warsaw) and scribbled “non-Jewish” on her report card.
  • She claimed she had experienced academic reprimands due to her communist and anti-Semitic activities and reputation. She turned in her thesis for a magister degree before World War II broke out but hadn’t yet completed the final exams.
  • In 1928, Sendler joined the Polish Socialist Party (PPS), a socialist political party in Poland, during the war after initially joining the Union of Polish Democratic Youth, a Polish communist youth organization.  
  • She was often denied work in the Warsaw school system due to the university’s unfavorable recommendations, attributing her to radical leftist views.
  • Sendler connected with the Wolna Wszechnica Polska, a social and academic institution in Poland, where she met and was influenced by members of the illegal Communist Party of Poland, a communist party active in Poland during the Second Polish Republic. 
  • Later on, Sendler joined a group of social workers who were all women at Wszechnica under the direction of Professor Helena Radlinska. A dozen or more of these women would go on to rescue Jews.
  • Sendler also worked at the Citizen Committee for Helping the Unemployed Section for Mother and Child Assistance, a legal counseling and social services clinic.
  • Sendler married Mieczyslaw Sendler in 1931. He was drafted into the military, taken prisoner in September 1939, and held as a prisoner of war by the Germans until 1945. Irena and Mieczyslaw divorced in 1947. 
  • Stefan Zgrzembski, a Jewish friend and wartime comrade, was the next man she wed. Together, they had three children: Janina, Andrzej (who passed away in infancy), and Adam. 
  • Zgrzembski left the family in 1957; he passed away in 1961, and Sendler remarried Mieczyslaw Sendler, her first spouse. They divorced a second time ten years later.

LIFE DURING WORLD WAR II

  • The German occupation authorities forbade the local Social Welfare Department, where Sendler worked, from providing help to Warsaw’s Jewish residents on September 1, 1939, a short time after the German invasion of Poland. 
  • Sendler aided the injured and ill Polish soldiers, her coworkers, and the department’s PPS cell activists.
  • On Sendler’s initiative, the cell started producing fake medical records required by the military and low-income families to get aid. 
  • Sendler also aided her Jewish clients, who were now only formally supported by the Jewish community institutions, her PPS comrades being unaware of her actions.
  • Irena and her co-social worker, Irena Schultz, were granted special permission to enter the ghetto to look for typhus symptoms because they were Social Welfare Department employees, which allayed German concerns that the illness would spread outside the ghetto.
  • Later, Sendler and other social workers would assist Jews who had escaped or set up the smuggling of infants and young children out of the ghetto using various methods that were at their disposal. 
  • In the summer of 1942, during the Great Action, getting Jews out of the ghetto and helping them find other places to live became a top priority.
  • Sendler became a member of the Polish Socialists, the PPS’s left-wing division. The Polish Socialist Workers’ Party, which collaborated with the communist Polish Workers’ Party (PPR), developed from the Polish Socialists.
  • Sendler was employed there under the fictitious name Klara Dabrowska, and among her responsibilities included finding somewhere to stay, creating phony documents, acting as a liaison, and leading activists to attend covert gatherings.
  • The Jewish ghetto in Poland was an active neighborhood many Jews considered the safest place for themselves and their children.
  • Furthermore, only those with financial advantages had a chance of surviving outside.
  • Members of the Jewish community, which is still there, contributed the initial finances for the transfer and maintenance of the ghetto children in collaboration with women from the Welfare Department.
  • American historian Deborah Dwork claims that Sendler served as both the catalyst and the motivation for the entire network that saved Jewish children. 
  • To maintain track of the children’s original and new identities, she and her coworker hid lists of the hidden children in jars. If their original family were still alive after the war, the goal was to return the kids to them.
  • The Gestapo, the official secret police of Nazi Germany, detained Sendler on October 18, 1943. Sendler gave her friend Janina Grabowska the lists of children as they plundered her home, and Grabowska kept the list. 
  • Sendler was taken to the Gestapo’s headquarters, mercilessly beaten. 
  • Despite this, she vowed never to abandon any of her allies or the children they had saved.
  • She was sent to the Pawiak prison, where she endured more questioning and beatings, before being transferred on November 13 to another location for a firing squad execution.
  • Maria Palester, a fellow Welfare Department activist who secured the required monies from Zegota leader Julian Grobelny via her connections, was responsible for ensuring Sendler’s release.
  • Julian Kulski, the mayor of Warsaw, requested authorization from the German government on November 30 to reinstate Sendler in the Welfare Department with back pay for her incarceration. On April 14, 1944, permission was given; however, Sendler thought it best to continue operating under the guise of nurse Klara Dabrowska.
  • She resumed her work as manager of the children’s area of Zegota as early as mid-December 1943. 
  • Sendler was a nurse at a field hospital during the Warsaw Uprising, where several Jews were concealed among other patients. 

LIFE AFTER WORLD WAR II

  • Previously financed by Zegota, Sendler’s hospital, now located in Okcie, ran out of funding. She rode in military vehicles on a hitchhike to Lublin to get money from the communist authorities before assisting Maria Palester in turning the hospital into the Warsaw Children’s Home.
  • Sendler resumed her other social work endeavors as well. She soon rose through the ranks of the new organizations, and in December 1945, she was appointed head of the municipal administration of Warsaw’s Department of Social Welfare. 
  • She managed her department by the ideas that Helena Radlinska taught her at the Free University—concepts that were revolutionary at the time.
  • The chairmanships of the Warsaw City Council’s Commission for Widows and Orphans and Health Commission, participation in the League of Women, and service on the governing councils of the Society of Friends of Children and the Society for Lay Schools were just a few of Sendler’s formal and social roles over the years. 
  • She was also a member of the Warsaw City Council. Sendler joined the Solidarity movement in 1980. She spent the rest of her life in Warsaw. She passed away on May 12, 2008, at 98. She is interred in Warsaw’s Powazki Cemetery.

Irena Sendler Worksheets

This fantastic bundle includes everything you need to know about Irena Sendler across 21 in-depth pages. These ready-to-use worksheets are perfect for teaching kids about Irena Sendler. Irena Stanislawa Sendler, also known as Irena Sendlerowa in Poland, was a Polish nurse, social worker, and humanitarian who worked with the Polish Underground Resistance in German-occupied Warsaw during World War II.

Complete List of Included Worksheets

Below is a list of all the worksheets included in this document.

  1. Irena Sendler Facts
  2. Sendler
  3. Courage
  4. Kindness
  5. Description
  6. What do you Think?
  7. Past and Present
  8. Interview with Sendler
  9. Sendler at Present
  10. Use your Eyes
  11. Issues

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Irena Sendler?

Irena Sendler was a Polish social worker and humanitarian who is known for her courageous efforts to save Jewish children during World War II. She worked as a nurse and used her position to smuggle approximately 2,500 Jewish children out of the Warsaw Ghetto, placing them with Polish families or in orphanages to protect them from the Nazis.

How did Irena Sendler rescue Jewish children during the war?

Irena Sendler organized a network of individuals to help her rescue Jewish children from the Warsaw Ghetto. She and her collaborators used various methods, including providing false documents, hiding children in bags or coffins, and secret underground passages to smuggle the children out. Once outside the ghetto, she found non-Jewish families willing to take in the children and provided them with new identities.

What were the risks and challenges Irena Sendler faced during her rescue operations?

Irena Sendler’s work to save Jewish children was extremely dangerous and carried severe consequences if she were caught. The Nazis considered such actions a capital offense, and anyone found helping Jews faced execution. Sendler faced constant risk of discovery, and if caught, she would have been tortured and killed. Additionally, the children she saved faced the danger of being discovered and sent to concentration camps.

Did Irena Sendler’s efforts go unnoticed during her lifetime?

Yes, for many years, Irena Sendler’s heroic actions went largely unnoticed. After the war, the communist regime in Poland suppressed information about her activities because she had been associated with the Polish underground resistance movement. It wasn’t until the late 1990s that her story gained international attention after a group of high school students from Kansas discovered her remarkable deeds and wrote a play about her.

What recognition did Irena Sendler receive for her actions?

Irena Sendler received numerous awards and honors for her bravery and humanitarian work. She was recognized as Righteous Among the Nations by Yad Vashem, Israel’s Holocaust memorial and museum. In 2007, she was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize, and although she did not win, her nomination brought her story to even greater prominence. Irena Sendler passed away in 2008, leaving a powerful legacy of selflessness and courage.

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