Homage to a Heroine

[The below text is not mine (as you can instantly see from the somewhat clumsy style). It was sent to me in one of those – often irritating – emails barrages that militant activists mount on the web. Since I do not wish to do to my friends what I abhor others doing to me, I never pass on such emails to the innocent folk in my @ddress book. But in the present instance, I admit the cause is righteous. So I copy its contents on Metis Meets Mittington for my readers to take note of. And if any of you wants to add his or her dime to the global campaign, as I do, he or she will surely know how to go about it. ABM.]

  

Irena Sendler  (15 February 1910 - 12 May 2008)

During World War II, Irena got permission to work in the Warsaw ghetto, as a plumbing and sewer specialist. 

She had an 'ulterior motive'. 

She KNEW what the Nazi's plans were for the Jews (being German). 

Irena smuggled infants out in the bottom of the tool box she carried and she carried in the back of her truck a burlap sack, (for larger  children).

She also had a dog in the back that she trained to bark when the Nazi soldiers let her in and out of the  ghetto.

The soldiers of course wanted nothing to do with the dog and the barking covered the infants' noises.  

During her time of doing this, she managed to smuggle out and save 2,500 children and infants.

She was caught, and the Nazi's broke both her legs, arms and beat her severely.

Irena kept a record of the names of all the kids she smuggled out and kept them in a glass jar, buried under a tree in her back yard.

After the war, she tried to locate any parents that may have survived it and reunited the family. 

Most had been gassed. Those children she helped got placed into foster family homes or adopted. 

In 2007 Irena was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize, but she was not selected. 

[More on Ms Sendler’s extraordinary deed may be seen on Wikipedia page: click HERE]

Alfred B Mittington adds:

Let us give this truly courageous lady the Real Peace Prize – rather than that moronic, politically inspired farce that the Oslo Nobel Prize Committee nowadays bestows on the most fashionable among their buddies. To wit: that every decent person on this earth remembers her deeds and speaks her name with awe whenever someone asks: have you ever heard of a hero?