Life in a Jar: The Irena Sendler Project

After the January Uprising, all telephone communication to the ghetto is cut off, leaving only unreliable or dangerous means of communication. Irena’s network is “inundated, and from day to day escape [grows] more hazardous” (210).

In January, Irena is woken up at three in the morning to knocking at her apartment door, along with the distinct smell of the sewers. A courier, “Teresa,” and her the children were separated from Sewer Man and the others. As Irena pulls them into her apartment, she notices one of her neighbors watching her through a slit in the doorway.

Irena takes them all into the bathroom, orders them to undress, and begins to bath the sewer stench and grime off the children. She recognizes one of the children as Piotr Zettinger, whose father she worked with prior to the war. Janina wakes up due to the commotion: “After three and a half years of occupation, this [is] the first time Irena [has] brought the risk of hiding Jews to her mother’s doorstep” (212), although she was certain her mother knew of her activities.

Realizing they do not have enough soap to wash the four children, they are forced to ask the same neighbor for some: “All these years and now something stupid—not enough soap” (212). By seven in the morning, the children are washed and on their way, but Irena cannot help but fear that they have been betrayed in the meantime. When she arrives home, everything seems normal. Her mother tells her that their neighbor had wondered about the soap; Janina, however, had explained that Irena misses her husband, and that doing the wash late at night helps her to forget.

In April 1943, during Passover, the Germans launch a final offensive against the ZOB and the remaining Jews in the ghetto:“Despite being vastly outnumbered and outgunned, the Jews [prove] to be persistent and elusive fighters, hiding in the elaborate underground city they had constructed” (214). Irena’s network continues to place those who escape during the fighting and provide supplies and funds for those in hiding. On Easter, Irena passes a fair that had been set up next to the wall—on one side, children play; on the other is a fierce battle between the SS and the ZOB. Irena struggles to discern from which side the screams come.

The fighting creates chaos and reckless abandon: “Children unexpectedly [pop] out of manholes, covered with sewage, accompanied by teenage couriers. The Germans [pump] poison gas into the sewers, which [are] now choked with bloated bodies. Yet children [continue] to escape, and Poles [continue] to shelter Jews” (215). Money for ZEGOTA is “parachuted into Poland tied about the waists of couriers” (216). Despite the influx of money, Irena still cannot keep up with the demands to place children.

After three weeks, the ZOB continues to battle the SS, but the “Ghetto Uprising” is finally put down, the ghetto leveled and destroyed: “No more children [appear] for ZEGOTA to hide. It [is] as if the spigot to the sewers [has] been turned off, the holes in the wall suddenly plastered over” (217). Irena returns to work but realizes that “it was rescue that had given meaning to chaos and cruelty” (218). 

The night of Irena’s Naming Day, October 20, her friend Janina comes to visit with an illegal jar of homemade vodka; they stay up well past curfew, and Janina stays the night. They are woken early in the morning by a sharp knocking at the door. Irena’s first instinct is to throw two tissue-paper lists she had set aside out the window as a precaution but stops when she sees two SS soldiers looking up at her from the courtyard. Janina instead takes the lists and hides them. Then Irena opens the door, and 10 SS troopers march into the apartment.

The soldiers hold guns on Irena and Janina while they ransack the apartment. Somehow, they do not find the zloty and Kennkarte hidden beneath her bed. As she’s taken away in the police car, she realizes that she still has part of the tissue-paper lists; she carefully tears the list into scraps, then lets it flutter away out the window.

At Szucha #25, Irena is interrogated and asked what she knows about ZEGOTA. She maintains, however, that she’s just a social worker. When she is shown a file on her, she discovers that she was betrayed by the owner of a laundry that served as one of their meeting places; the woman had broken under torture and was later executed. She did not, however, mention ZEGOTA by name, only “a secret organization” (223). In reading through the file, she realizes they don’t know who she really is and continues to play dumb.

Following her initial interrogation, she is taken formally to Pawiak Prison and assigned to a small, “windowless cell with two bunks and seven other women” (225). The women take turns on the bunks, and Irena, who has not slept in two days, falls into a fitful sleep. She soon meets her interrogator, a “stout German” with “two or three days’ growth of beard,” who smells “of alcohol and tobacco” (225). He tells her that if he does not get a confession out of her, he’ll be sent to the Eastern Front, so for him, it is his life or hers.

Each day, she alternates between working in the laundry room and interrogations with Herr Bach. She soon learns from Basia, an older cellmate, that they come for the executions early in the morning, following which, you know you are safe: “It’s horrible to live like this, but this is the way it is” (227). Her beatings begin lightly at first, then get heavier; each day, they last for an hour, after which she must “stand for ten more hours on her swollen throbbing legs, blood clotting her prison pinafore to her skin” (227-28). In order to elude the pain, Irena chooses a different childhood memory to focus on, a different loved one to conjure up. On a particularly vicious day, she passes out from the pain and regains consciousness on the floor of the toilet room, “lying in her own dried blood” (228).

Some of the women are allowed to have their children with them if there is no one to care for them at home; the children are allowed to play in the courtyard twice a day. One day, Irena watches an SS officer offer some candy to a child, which the child takes. As the child walks away, the soldier takes “his Luger from its holster, casually [aims it] at the boy’s back, and [shoots] him dead” (229).

On Christmas Eve, Irena is ordered to go see the dentist, despite having no problems with her teeth. While the dentist drills her healthy tooth, she places a grypsy—a note from the outside—into her cheek from ZEGOTA; the note tells Irena that ZEGOTA is doing everything it can to get her out. Irena replies that the lists are safe, but doubts ZEGOTA’s ability to get her out of Pawiak, a place no one escapes.

On New Year’s Day, Irena receives another message, this time from Irena Schultz, telling her that her mother is not doing well. Although it makes her sad, she is grateful for the message. She hopes that her mother will die before she is executed. On January 20, Irena is finally called forward to be executed.