If you’re still watching, drop a comment right now telling us where you’re from. We want to know this community. Are you Indian, United States, Poland, Israel, Germany? Your engagement keeps these stories alive. Let us know you’re here. Ireina couldn’t save 2,500 children alone. She built a network that would rival any resistance.

Operation in occupied Europe. the operation required multiple components each operating independently so that if one link was discovered the entire chain wouldn’t collapse the recruiters these were wman who worked inside the ghetto identifying children who could be saved they approached desperate parents with an impossible offer give us your child and we’ll get them out we lines give them false papers we’ll place them with Christian families. They might survive.

If they stay here, they’ll die. Jewish mothers face the most horrific choice imaginable. Give your child to s strangers who might betray you to the Gustapo or keep your child and watch them starve or worse, be loaded onto trains to Trebinka. Mothers would kiss their children goodbye, whisper their real names one last time, and hand them over to women they’d never see again.

The smugglers, Ireina and her network developed dozens of methods to get children out of the ghetto. Babies were hidden in toolboxes, inside packages, under loads of goods. Toddlers were sedated and placed in coffins, smuggled out in fake funeral processions. Older children escaped through the sewers, crawling through human waste for owls to emerge outside the ghetto walls.

Some children were loaded into ambulances, pretending to be sick with typhus. The Germans never looked inside ambulances for fear of infection. One of Irene’s regular methods involved a Catholic church that stood on the boundary between the ghetto and the Aryan side of Warsaw. The church had entrances on both sides of the wall.

Kyle Dren would enter through the ghetto side during services be hidden in the church then walked out the other side into free Warsaw. The priest was complicit. The entire congregation knew not one person ever informed the document forges. Every child needed false papers, birth certificates, baptismal records, identification documents showing they were Catholic polls, not Jewish refugees.

 Ireina’s network included skilled forggers who created thousands of documents, each one perfect enough to pass German inspection. Names were chosen carefully. Polish names, Christian names, names T hat wouldn’t raise suspicion. the placement network. Once children were out of the ghetto, they needed somewhere to go.

 Ireina recruited dozens of Christian families willing to hide Jewish children and she worked with convents and orphanages whose nuns agreed to take children with no questions asked. She created a scattered network across Warsaw and the surrounding countryside. children placed in individually or in small groups. Never concentrated in one location where a single betrayal could doom them all.

The record keeper, this was Ireina herself. She insisted on maintaining a complete record of every child’s true identity. She wrote down their real names, their parents’ names, their addresses in the ghetto, and their false identities on the outside. She coded this information. Anne buried it in glass jars beneath an apple tree in a colleagueu’s garden.

 Why keep records when discovery meant certain death? Because Ireina believed the war would end. She believed some parents would survive. And when they came looking for their children, someone needed to know who these children really were. Someone needed to be able to reunite families torn apart by genocide. Their operation scaled rapidly.

 By mid 1942, Ireina and her network were smuggling out multiple children every day. The system became almost routine. Identify a child, approach the parents, get consent, forge documents, plan the extraction, execute the smuggling, place the child, record the information, bury the jar. but routine bred complacency and in October 1943 the Gustapo was w 18 the arrest October 20th 1943 3:00 a.m.

 Irene awoke to pounding on her door. She knew immediately what it meant that Gustapo had found her. Someone had talked or someone had been tortured or someone had made a mistake. It didn’t matter. They had come. She had seconds to act. She grabbed the list. She kept at home, the names of network members, the safe houses, the contacts.

 She shoved the papers into her colleagues hands through her back window and told her to run. Then Ireina opened the door. The Gustapo arrested her and took her to Pavia Prison, the most notorious interrogatio and center in Warsaw. What followed was three months of systematic torture designed to break her and extract the names of the children, the families hiding them, and every member of her network. They beat her with clubs.

 They broke her legs and feet with hammers, shattering bones that would never heal properly. They burned her with cigarettes. They subjected her to psychological torture, threatening to arrest her family, to kill her mother, to execute her friends one by one until she talked. Ireina gave them nothing. Not one name, not one location, not one piece of information that would endanger a child or the people protecting them.

The Gustapo couldn’t understand it. They had perfected the art of interrogation. They had brokenheartened resistance fighters, communist agents, trained soldiers. But this woman, this tiny, broken woman with shattered legs and burns covering her body, refused to speak. She sat in her cell, endured their torture, and smiled at them.

 When they asked for names, after 3 months, they gave up on interrogation and sentenced her to death. Irene Sendler would be executed by firing squad. The date was set January 1944. The Locat iron pave courtyard where hundreds of Polish resistors had already died. Ireina prepared to die. She wrote a final letter to her mother.

 She prayed for the children she had saved. She hoped that Jars were still buried safely under the apple tree. She had saved 2,500 lives. If she died, it was worth it. But Jeota had other plans. The underground bribed the German guard. They paid him a fortune money collected from across the network from Jewish families who had escaped from sympathetic Poles from anyone who could contribute. The guard agreed to help.

 On the morning of Ireina’s scheduled execution, he led her out of her cell, walked her through a side entrance and handed her off to resistance members waiting outside. Ireina Sendler, sentenced to death, legs shattered, bod why broken, walked out of Puffyak prison while the Gapo posted her name on public execution lists.

 They announced she had been shot. They wanted the resistance to believe she was dead. They wanted tea or demoralize her network, but Ireina was alive and she went right back to work. If this story is hitting you emotionally, share it right now. Hit that like button. Subscribe to this channel. Co me comment below with your thoughts.

 This woman’s courage deserves to be remembered. Let us know you’re watching the continuation. The Gustapo thought they had killed Irenea Sendler. Her name appeared on a fisher l execution lists posted throughout Warsaw. Underground newspapers reported her death. But Ireina was hiding in a safe house on the outskirts of the city, recovering from her injuries.

 Planning her return to the network. Her legs never healed properly. She would walk with a limp for the rest of her life. The torture scars covered her body. The psychological trauma would haunt her for deca day, but she refused to stop. Children were still dying in the ghetto. The deportations to Trabinka were accelerating.

Every day she delayed meant more children on trains to death camps. She adopted a new false identity and resumed smuggling operations. The methods changed. The Gustapo was now actively hunting for child smugglers, but the mission continued. Ireina personally smuggled out an estimated 400 more children between her escape in January 1944 and the Warsaw Uprising in August 1944.

The Warsaw Uprising was a catastrophe. The Polish home army rose against the Germans in August 19th 44 hoping to liberate Warsaw before the Soviet army arrived. The uprising lasted 63 days. The Germans crushed it brutally, killing over 200,000 civilians and leveling the entire city.

 Ireina survived by hiding in basement and moving constantly between safe houses. When the Soviets finally liberated Warsaw in January 1945, the city was rubble. Over 85% of buildings were destroyed. The ghetto had been completely liquidated, demolished. Building by building, after the ghetto uprising in 1943, nearly all of Warsaw’s Jewish population was dead, murdered in Trebinka or shot in the et but 25,500 children were alive, hidden across Poland, living with Christian families, raised in convents, surviving under false names, and Ireina

Sendler had their real names buried you near an apple tree. The Gustapo officer looked down at the 12-year-old girl standing before him at the Warsaw Ghetto checkpoint, October 15th, 1942. Her name was Ireina Sendler, though that wasn’t the name on her papers. She carried a toolbox, wore oversized workclo, and had the kind of innocent face that made grown men smile and wave her through barriers without thinking twice.

 The officer checked her identification. City Sanitation Department, Typhus Inspection Unit. He wrinkled his nose at the thought of disease and gestured her through the gate. He had no idea that the toolbox contained a six-month-old Jewish baby drugged into silence wrapped in rags hidden beneath a false bottom. He had no idea that this child had been doing this for 6 months, making two, sometimes three trips per day into the ghetto.

 He had no idea that over the next 2 years, this girl would smuggle 2500 Jewish children out of the Warsaw Ghetto, right under the noses of the SS, saving more lives than Oscar Schindler, more lives than any single person in the entire Holocaust. And he definitely had no idea that Inrea Sendler wasn’t actually 12 years old. She was 29.

 She was a trained social worker. She was a member of the Polish resistance. and she had discovered something that would make her the most effective rescuer in Nazi occupied Poland. The Germans consistently underestimated women, especially women who looked like children. So Inrea made herself look younger. She wore her hair in braids.

She dressed in clothes too big for her small frame. She adopted a childish demeanor, all wide eyes and nervous giggles. The Nazis saw a scared little girl doing menial work in a plague zone. They never looked twice. They never searched thoroughly. They never suspected that this child was running the most sophisticated underground railroad in Warsaw with networks spanning the entire city with forged documents for hundreds of families with safe houses, Christian families willing to hide Jewish children, and a coded

list buried in glass jars beneath an apple tree that would preserve the true identities of every child she saved. This story remained hidden for 60 years. Ireina Sandler never spoke about what she did. When reporters finally found her in 1999, she was 90 years old, living in a tiny Warsaw apartment, insisting she was no hero.

 She said she regretted not saving more. She said the real heroes were the Jewish mothers who gave up their children to a stranger, knowing they would likely never see them again. She said the children who survived deserved the credit, not her. But the numbers tell a different story. 2500 children. 2500 lives saved.

 Each one smuggled out of the ghetto in toolboxes, potato sacks, coffins, ambulances, through sewers, hidden in loads of goods, sedated and silent. Each one given false papers, false names, false histories. each one placed with Christian families or in convents or orphanages where they would survive the war while their parents died in Trebinka.

If you want to see how a woman who looked like a child became the Nazis worst nightmare and saved more Jewish lives than almost anyone in history, hit that like button right now. This story is going to blow your mind. Subscribe if you haven’t already because we bring you these forgotten heroes every single week. Back to Ina. The beginning.

 Ireina Sendler was not supposed to be a hero. She was supposed to be a social worker in Warsaw, helping poor families, processing paperwork, living a quiet life in a city that was about to be consumed by hell. Born in 1910 to a Catholic family in Atwok, Poland, Inrea grew up watching her father, a doctor, treat patients regardless of their ability to pay.

 He specialized in treating poor Jewish families during a typhus epidemic. often refusing payment from those who couldn’t afford it. When Inrea was seven, her father died of typhus, caught from the patients he refused to stop treating. His last words to her were remembered for the rest of her life.

 If you see someone drowning, you must try to rescue them, even if you cannot swim. She studied Polish literature at Varsaw University in the 1930s. She witnessed the rise of anti-semitic policies, the growing restrictions on Jewish students, the casual cruelty that was becoming normalized. When the university introduced ghetto benches, segregated seating for Jewish students, Ireina defaced her student ID in protest and was suspended. She didn’t care.

 She had learned from her father that some things mattered more than following rules. She became a social worker with Warsaw’s social welfare department in 1939, just months before Germany invaded Poland. When the Nazis occupied Warsaw in September 1939, Inrea was 29 years old, unmarried, living alone, working with families across the city, she had access to homes, to records, to the bureaucracy that the Germans would soon exploit to identify and isolate Jewish families.

The Warsaw Ghetto was established in October 1940. Over 400,000 Jews, nearly a third of Warsaw’s entire population, were forced into a 1.3 square mile area surrounded by a 10-ft wall topped with barbed wire. The Germans sealed the ghetto in November 1940. Anyone caught leaving without authorization would be shot.

 Anyone caught helping Jews escape would be executed along with their entire family. Ina immediately began forging documents. She obtained a pass from the city’s epidemic control department, claiming she needed access to the ghetto to conduct typhus inspections. The Germans were terrified of typhus. They believed Jews were carriers of disease.

 They gave Ina unrestricted access to the ghetto, happy to let a Polish social worker expose herself to infection while they stayed safely outside the walls. Ireina walked into the ghetto for the first time in December 1940 and saw hell on earth. Families crowded tend to a room, children begging in the streets, bodies lying where they fell, waiting for burial carts, people starving while SS guards laughed and took photographs.

 The Nazis had turned a third of Warsaw’s population into prisoners in their own city, and they were systematically starving them to death. Ireina made a decision that day. She would save as many as she possibly could. She would focus on children because children could be hidden, could be given new identities, could survive if someone got them out before the deportations to death camps began.

She recruited nine other women, all social workers or nurses, all with access to the ghetto. They called themselves the Zagota, the Polish Council to Aid Jews. They began small, smuggling food, medicine, clothing. Then they became more ambitious, smuggling people. The first child Ire Ina smuggled out was a six-month-old baby in January 1941.

 She sedated the infant with a small dose of medicine to keep it quiet, wrapped it in rags, placed it at the bottom of her toolbox beneath a layer of tools, and walked past the German guards at the checkpoint. The guards never looked. Why would they search a toolbox? Why would they suspect a woman who looked barely old enough to be out of school? The baby survived.

 Ireina placed her with a Christian family who raised her as their own. One child saved. 2499 to go. The aftermath. The war ended. Poland was liberated by the Soviet Union, which meant trading one occupation for another. The communist government that took control of Poland had no interest in celebrating Catholic rescuers of Jews.

 Ireina’s heroism was politically inconvenient. The communists wanted to focus on Soviet liberation, not Polish re seance dot dot. Ireina retrieved the jars from beneath the apple tree inside with a coded lists 2500 names, addresses, identities. She began the heartbreaking work of trying to reunite children with surviving family members, most parents were dead.

Of the 2,500 children she saved, only a few hundred ever found surviving relatives. The rest had lost everyone parents murdered in Tbinka. Siblings dead in the ghetto, grandparents shot in the streets. These children had been saved, but they were orphans. their entire families erased by genocide. Ireina helped place orphan children with adopt if families or in Jewish orphanages.

 She worked with organizations trying to rebuild Jewish communities in Poland. She never asked for recognition. She never sought attention. She considered what our she had done to be basic human decency not heroism not extraordinary. just what any person should have done when faced with evil. Poland’s communist government interrogated her.

 In 1948, accusing her of working with Western capitalist organizations. They suspected her of being a spy. She was detained, questioned, and warned to stop her work with Jewish refugees. The re gim that should have celebrated her treated her like a criminal. Ireina went back to social work.

 She married, had children, lived quietly in Warsaw for 40 years. She never spoke publicly about her wartime activities. The story of the two 500 children remained unknown outside a small circle of survivors and network members. Then in 1965, Yad Vashim in Israel began recognizing righteous among the nations non-Jews who had risked their lives to save Jews during the Holocaust.

 Someone nominated Ireina Sendler. Israeli researchers investigated. They interviewed survivors. They verified the number s. In 1965, Irene Sendler was recognized as righteous among the nations. She was invited to Israel. She met some of the children she had saved now adults with their own family. I yes, they wept when they saw her. They called her there.

Savior, she told them she had only done what anyone should have done. But Poland’s communist government forbaded her from traveling to Israel to receive Eevee award. They denied her passport. They didn’t want a story about Catholic Polish heroism saving Jews. It didn’t fit their narrative.

 Ireina received her recognition in absentia. For the next 30 years, she remained virtually unknown. A few articles mentioned her work. A small number of survivors knew her name, but the broader world had never heard of Irene Sendler. That changed in 1999 because of for high school students in Kansas.

 The discovery Uniontown High School, Kansas. 1999, a rural school in a town with almost no Jewish population. a history teacher. Nor Med Norman Connard gave his students in assignment research and sung heroes of the Holocaust for students Meghan Stewart, Elizabeth Campbas, Sabrina Coons, and Janice Underwood found a brief reference in a 1990 for US News and World Report article.

 Ireina Sendler saved 2,500 children from the Warsaw Ghetto. The students were skeptical. They had never heard this name. Oscar Schindler s ad about 1,200 people and had a famous movie made about him. This unknown woman supposedly saved more than twice as many children. And nobody had heard of her.

 It seemed like the number must be wrong. Dot dot. They researched further. They contacted Holocaust scholars. They reached out to Jewish organizations. Every source confirmed, “Yes, Irene Sendler was real. Yes, she saved 2,500 children. Yes, she was still alive, living in Warsaw at age 89.” The students wrote a play called Life in a Jar about Irene’s story.

 They performed it at their school, then at other schools, then at churches and community centers. The story spread. Media picked it up. Suddenly, this forgotten hero was being rediscovered by the world. The students raised money to visit Ireina in Warsaw in 2001. T found her living in a tiny apartment, subsisting on a small pension, her legs still damaged from the Gustapo torture 58 years earlier.

 She was frail, elderly, humble, she told the stud. Hence, she didn’t deserve attention. She said the mothers who gave up their children were the heroes. The students disagreed. They returned to Kansas and continued performing their play. They turned Ireina Sendler’s story into a mission to ensure she would never be forgotten again.

 The play has now been performed over 400 times in multiple countries. Thousands of students have learned about Ireina Sen because for teenagers from Kansas decided her story mattered. The recognition once the world discovered Ireina Sendler, the honors followed rapidly. In 2003, Poland awarded her the Order of the White Eagle, the nation’s highest civilian honor.

 In 2006, she was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize she didn’t win, which caused controversy. Many felt she deserved it more than the actual winner. In 2007, the Polish Senate made her an honorary citizen, but the recognition came almost too late. Ireina Sandler died on May 12th, 2008. At age 98, she lived long enough to see the world.

 Rod finally understand what she had done. She lived long enough to meet many of the children she had saved, now grandparents themselves. She lived long enough to know that her story would survive. At her funeral in Warso, thousands of people lined the streets. Survivors from across the world attended. Israeli dignitaries gave speeches.

 The president of Poland eulogized her. And in Israel, 2,500 trees were planted in her honor one. For each child she saved, comment below if you’re still here. Tell us, did you know about Ireina Sendler before this video? Share this story with someone who needs to hear it. Hit that subscribe button. This channel exists to bring forgotten heroes into the light. The legacy.

Today, Ireina Sendler is celebrated as one of the greatest heroes of the Holocaust. Schools are named after her in Poland, Israel, and the United States. Books have been written about her life. Documentaries have told her story. The jars she buried beneath the AP pledge are preserved in museums. But the most important legacy is the 2,500 lives she saved.

 Those children grew up, had children of their own, had grandchildren. Today, it’s estimated that over 6,000 people are alive because Ireina Sendler smuggled their parents or grandparents out of the Warsaw ghetto into books and coffins and ambulances. 6,000 people, multiple generations, family, s careers, marriages, children, grandchildren, greatg grandandchildren, all existing because a 29-year-old social worker who made herself look like a child decided that if she saw someone doctor owning, she would try to rescue them even if she couldn’t swim. The

story of Ireina Sendler forces us to confront uncomfortable questions about courage and heroism. She wasn’t a soldier. She wasn’t t trained in combat or espionage. She was a social worker with access to the ghetto and a willingness to risk everything. She could have kept her head down, done her job, survive d the war safely.

 Instead, she chose to smuggle children, knowing that discovery meant torture and death. And when the Gustapo did catch her, when they shattered her legs and burned her body, she he gave them nothing. Not one name, not one location. She protected 2,500 children and every family hiding them by enduring torture that would break most trained soldiers.

 What kind of person does that? What kind of strength does that require? Ireina would say she wasn’t special. She would say anyone would have done the same. But we know that’s not true. Most people didn’t do the same. Most people looked away. Most people stayed safe. Ireina Sendler ran toward the drowning.

 She jumped in knowing she couldn’t swim. And she saved 2,500 lives. The final message. Before we finish, I need three things from you. First, hit that like button right now. If this story moved you, every like tells YouTube that real history matters. Second, subscribe to this channel and turn on notificati arms.

 We bring you forgotten heroes like Arena Sendler every single week. Third, comment below telling us where you’re watching from and whether you’d heard of Ireina before this video. You’re in gag. Emmen keeps these stories alive. Ireina Sendler spent 60 years in obscurity, believing the world had forgotten her. She died knowing her story would survive, but only because for high school, students from Kansas decided to investigate her.

Footnote in a magazine article. How many other arenas are out there? How many other heroes saved lives and died unknown? How many stories are buri in archives waiting for someone to discover them? That’s why this channel exists. We dig through history. We find the stories that deserve to be told. We bring forgotten heroes back into the light.

And we need you to help us. Every like, every comment, every share, every subscription tells YouTube to show these stories to more people. You’re not just a viewer, you’re part of Riskui. NG history from oblivion. Ireina Sendler saved two 500 children. She looked like a child herself. She walked past Nazi guards with babies in tool boxes.

 She endured torture that would break train soldi she never sought recognition. She died believing she should have saved more. But 2500 children survive because of her. And now because you watched this video because you engaged with it because you’re sharing it. Millions of people will know her name. That matters.

You matter. Thank you for being here. Thank you for caring about forgotten history. We’ll see why we’re in the next video with another incredible story that deserves to be remembered. Don’t forget to like, subscribe, and comment. You’re not just watching history, you’re keeping it