When we were first assigned the topic of Irena Sendler for our project, we were a little concerned. At least with the other topics we have had either some lecture or discussion as a group, or at the very least, we all had some information or idea of the topic coming into the program. Irena Sendler was a character that the non-Polish fellow had only vaguely heard of beforehand. We knew that she was a hero of some sort and was connected with the Jews in the Holocaust, but even those who grew up in Poland around her legend were not prepared for the sort of powerful individual that she was. With this basic knowledge, we realized that the obvious first goal of our workshop would be education on her life and story as well as drawing some message from her life work on how to be better people. While the goal of making better people is rather unrealistic for a 90 minute workshop, we hope that the students use this workshop as a time and space to think critically about their lives and how they can be inspired to improve themselves.
Because we had a more limited starting point for understanding who she was, we have had the great joy in discovering how incredible she was. One of the most moving parts of our research involved reading her eulogy in different news sources. On the one hand, she was a hero in the most literal sense of the word, but on the other hand, her life is so unknown that the newspapers could not fully sum up how much she has given.
When getting feedback on our workshops, the feedback we received focused on the worry that we were putting her on a pedestal and making her a lofty hero instead of a woman who did what she thought was right. This was one of the biggest challenges of the revisions, because in many ways we do want to put her on a pedestal, mostly because we believe that she deserves it, however that creates an not relatable personage. We think that she deserves to be given an honorific place in history. Perhaps the greatest honor is not being a lofty hero, but being one that students some 70 years later can draw inspiration from. Not everyone has the courage to smuggle 2500 children out of the Warsaw ghetto and into homes and convents in the Aryan part of Warsaw, but everyone might have the courage to stand against injustice in many ways, both large and small.
What we liked most about the story of Irena Sendler was that was so open to interpretation and for evaluation in modern society. We could have talked about her as a hero that saved Jewish children, but in doing so converted them to Roman Catholic to ensure their safety during the war. If their Jewishness dies in the ghetto, how much of their identity is lost as well? How does this contribute to the homogeneous society of Poland? The discussion we decided was more uplifting, personal, and possibly relevant for the high school student target group of our workshop. We decided to ‘use’ Irena Sendler as a model for what it means to take action against injustice and how much courage is involved in not being a passive witness.
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