Before World War II Sendler was born on 15 February 1910 in
Warsaw, to
Stanisław Henryk Krzyżanowski, a physician, and his wife, Janina Karolina (née Grzybowska). She was
baptized Irena Stanisława on 2 February 1917 in
Otwock. She initially grew up in Otwock, a town about southeast of Warsaw, where there was a Jewish community. Her father, a humanitarian who treated the very poor, including Jews, free of charge, died in February 1917 from
typhus contracted from his patients. After his death, the Jewish community offered financial help for the widow and her daughter, though Janina Krzyżanowska declined their assistance. Afterwards she lived in
Tarczyn and
Piotrków Trybunalski. From 1927, Sendler studied law for two years and then
Polish literature at the
University of Warsaw, interrupting her studies for several years from 1932 to 1937. She opposed the
ghetto benches system practiced in the 1930s at many Polish institutions of higher learning (from 1937 at the University of Warsaw) and defaced the "non-Jewish" identification on her grade card. She reported having suffered from academic disciplinary measures because of her activities and reputation as a communist and
philo-Semite. By the outbreak of
World War II she submitted her
magister degree thesis, but had not taken the final exams. Sendler was employed in a legal counseling and social help clinic, the Section for Mother and Child Assistance at the Citizen Committee for Helping the Unemployed. She published two pieces in 1934, both concerned with the situation of children born
out of wedlock and their mothers. She worked mostly in the field, crisscrossing Warsaw's impoverished neighborhoods, and her clients were helpless, socially disadvantaged women. In 1935, the government abolished the section. Many of its members became employees of the City of Warsaw, including Sendler in the Department of Social Welfare and Public Health. Sendler married Mieczysław Sendler in 1931. She then married Stefan Zgrzembski (born Adam Celnikier), a Jewish friend and wartime companion, by whom she had three children, Janina, Andrzej (who died in infancy), and Adam (who died of heart failure in 1999). In 1957 Zgrzembski left the family; he died in 1961 and Irena remarried her first husband, Mieczysław Sendler. Ten years later they divorced again.
During World War II Soon after the
German invasion, on 1 September 1939, the German occupation authorities ordered Jews removed from the staff of the municipal Social Welfare Department where Sendler worked and barred the department from providing any assistance to Warsaw's Jewish citizens. Sendler with her colleagues and activists from the department's PPS cell became involved in helping the wounded and sick Polish soldiers. On Sendler's initiative the cell began generating false medical documents, needed by the soldiers and poor families to obtain aid. Her PPS comrades unaware, Sendler extended such assistance also to her Jewish charges, who were now officially served only by the Jewish community institutions. As employees of the Social Welfare Department, Sendler and Schultz gained access to special permits for entering the ghetto to check for signs of
typhus, a disease the Germans feared would spread beyond the ghetto. This work was done at huge risk, as—since October 1941—giving any kind of assistance to Jews in
German-occupied Poland was punishable by death, not just for the person who was providing the help but also for their entire family or household. Sendler joined the Polish Socialists, a left-wing branch of the
Polish Socialist Party (PPS). The Polish Socialists evolved into the Polish Socialist Workers' Party (RPPS), which cooperated with the communist
Polish Workers' Party (PPR). Sendler was known there by her conspiratorial pseudonym Klara and among her duties were searching for places to stay, issuing fake documents and being a liaison, guiding activists to clandestine meetings. In the RPPS there were Poles she knew, involved in saving Jews, as well as Jews that she had helped. Sendler participated in the secret life of the ghetto. She described a commemoration event there, on the anniversary of the
October Revolution but in the spirit of the Polish leftist tradition; it included artistic performances by children. While in the ghetto, she wore a
Star of David as a sign of solidarity with the Jewish people. during the Great Action people from the Welfare Department operated individually (had no organization or leader). Other accounts suggest that women from that group concentrated on making arrangements for Jews who had already left the ghetto, and that Sendler in particular took care of adults and adolescents.
Żegota (the Council to Aid Jews) was an underground organization that originated on 27 September 1942 as the
Provisional Committee to Aid Jews, led by
Zofia Kossak-Szczucka, a resistance fighter and writer. By that time, most Polish Jews were no longer alive.
Żegota, established on 4 December 1942, was a new form of the committee, expanded by the participation of Jewish parties and chaired by
Julian Grobelny. In 1963, Sendler specifically listed 29 people she worked with within the
Żegota operation, adding that 15 more perished during the war. In regard to the action of saving Jewish children, according to a 1975 opinion written by Sendler's former Welfare Department co-workers, she was the most active and organizationally gifted of participants. Helena Rybak and Jadwiga Koszutska were activists from the
communist underground. In August 1943,
Żegota set up its children's section, directed by Aleksandra Dargiel, a manager in the
Central Welfare Council (RGO). Dargiel, overwhelmed by her RGO duties, resigned in September and proposed Sendler to be her replacement. Sendler, then known by her
nom de guerre Jolanta, took over the section from October 1943. Permanently, Jewish children were placed by Sendler's network with Polish families (25%), in Warsaw orphanage of the
Franciscan Sisters of the Family of Mary led by Mother Provincial
Matylda Getter, Roman Catholic convents such as the Sister Servants of the Blessed Virgin Mary in
Turkowice (sisters Aniela Polechajłło and Antonina Manaszczuk) or the
Felician Sisters, in Boduen Home charity facilities for children, and other orphanages (75%). A nun convent offered the best opportunity for a Jewish child to survive and be taken care of. To accomplish the transfers and placement of children, Sendler worked closely with other volunteers. The children were often given Christian names and taught Christian prayers in case they were tested. She and her co-workers buried lists of the hidden children in jars in order to keep track of their original and new identities. The aim was to return the children to their original families, if still alive after the war. As they ransacked her house, Sendler tossed the lists of children to her friend Janina Grabowska, who hid the list in her loose clothing. Her life was saved, however, because the German guards escorting her were bribed, and she was released on the way to the execution. Already in mid-December 1943, she resumed her duties as manager of the children's section of
Żegota. During the
Warsaw Uprising, Sendler worked as a nurse in a field hospital, where a number of Jews were hidden among other patients. She was wounded by a German deserter she encountered while searching for food. She continued to work as a nurse until the Germans left Warsaw, retreating before the advancing
Soviet troops. Sendler and her co-workers gathered all of the records with the names and locations of the hidden Jewish children and gave them to their
Żegota colleague
Adolf Berman and his staff at the
Central Committee of Polish Jews. Almost all of the children's parents had been murdered at the
Treblinka extermination camp or had gone missing. Sendler joined the
communist Polish Workers' Party in January 1947 and remained a member of its successor, the
Polish United Workers' Party, until the party's dissolution in 1990. According to the research done by
Anna Bikont, in 1947 Sendler advanced to the party executive by becoming a member of the Social Welfare Section at the
Central Committee's Social-Vocational Department. From then she continuously held a succession of high-level party and administrative posts during the entire
Stalinist period and beyond, including the jobs of department director in the Ministry of Education from 1953 and of department director in the Ministry of Health in 1958–1962. Especially prior to 1950, Sendler was heavily involved in Central Committee work and party activism, which included implementation of social rules and propagation of ideas dictated by the Stalinist doctrine, and policy enforcement; by engaging in such pursuits, she abandoned some of her previously held views and lost some important acquaintances. Her continuing employment in high-level state positions also speaks against the possibility that she was a subject of serious investigation. She was recognized by
Yad Vashem as one of the Polish
Righteous Among the Nations and received her award at the embassy of
Israel in Warsaw in 1965, together with Irena Schultz. In 1983 she traveled to Israel, invited by Yad Vashem Institute for the tree-planting ceremony. At every stage of her career, she worked long hours and was intensely involved in various social work programs, such as helping teenage prostitutes in the ruins of post-war Warsaw recover and return to society, organizing a number of orphanages and care centers for children, families and the elderly, or a center for prostitutes in Henryków. She was known for her effectiveness and displayed a sharp edge when confronted with obstruction or indifference. Around 1956, Sendler asked Teresa Körner, whom she had helped during the war and who was now in Israel, to assist her with immigration to Israel with children, who were Jewish and not safe in Poland. Körner discouraged Sendler's move. In the spring of 1967, suffering from a variety of health problems, including a heart condition and anxiety disorder, Sendler applied for a disability pension. She was dismissed from the school's vice-principal position in May 1967, shortly before the
Arab–Israeli War. Sendler never told her children of the Jewish origin of their father; Janina Zgrzembska found out as an adult. It wouldn't make any difference, she said: the way they were brought up, race or origin didn't matter. In 1980, Sendler joined the
Solidarity movement. ==Recognition and remembrance==