Life in a Jar: The Irena Sendler Project

The time has finally arrived for the girls to meet Irena, who shares a small apartment with her daughter-in-law, granddaughter, and a small dog. The documentary film director has them reenact their arrival due to a blown light. This prompts “Mr. C. to wonder: could something staged be as true—or truer—than what it was re-enacting?” (306). The play, for example, contains errors and inaccuracies, but also changes things to make them clearer and more interesting—to what extent can their story, then, be considered to be true?

As they enter, a nurse tells them that Irena has been ill, and that they may only be able to stay for 15 to 20 minutes. There are 20 people waiting for them inside, and the room explodes into a cacophony of questions and photographs. They are then taken down the hall to meet Irena. They cautiously approach Irena, who appears to them very frail; she embraces the group with tears streaming down her cheeks.

The girls present Irena with gifts: a paper heart signed by Uniontown students, a vase of flowers, and a wall hanging of sunflowers. The nurse whispers something in her ear, but Irena shoos her away and begins to tell the students all about the other heroes of the era, as well as further details about her own story.

Irena gives the girls her own gift—necklaces with silver hearts on the chain: “I give to each of you a piece of my heart” (309). She then asks if any of them have any “burning questions” (309). Megan asks a series of rapid-fire questions; Irena has to stop her before trying to answer them to the best of her ability, including why she did it, which Irena responds to by reiterating that it was “the need of [her] heart” (310). In response to a question about the jars, Irena tells them that, after the war, they dug the jars up for the first time in daylight and made a “crude accounting” (311)of their contents. They continued to aid the children with food, money, and papers to the best of their ability, though it was difficult to locate the families due to the devastation of the war.

Further, there were implications they hadn’t reckoned with. For one, digging up the jars one final time forced them to realize that many, if not most, of the parents were now dead. Second, many of the younger children had only ever known their adoptive family; if their real parents were still alive, the children would have to live through the further trauma of being taken from the only family they’d ever known to their real family, whom they had never known.

The work of finding the children was too much for Irena, so she gave them to Adolf Berman, president of the Central Committee of Polish Jews. A few years later, he moved to Israel, and she doesn’t know what happened to the lists.

Irena reiterates the difficulty the Polish heroes continued to face under communism. She tells them that her own children only discovered Irena’s heroism when she was awarded the Yad Vashem medal; as a result of the award, her children began to face their own discrimination. She finishes by reiterating that she “had to help. It is not true that this was a heroic act, only a simple and natural need of the heart” (313).