In Warsaw, in late October 1943, Irina Sandler and Janina Grabowska were enjoying a rare moment of peace in their war-torn city. But their laughter stopped when they heard the Gestapo banging on Sandler's door.
The dispatcher heads to the window to dispose of the incriminating evidence — only to see more police patrols below.
Knowing she is minutes away from arrest, she throws Janina her most dangerous possession: a glass jar containing the names of more than 2,000 Jewish children she smuggled to safety.
The arrest was not the first fallout Sandler faced in his lifelong crusade against anti-Semitism. Born to Catholic parents in 1910, she grew up in a predominantly Jewish town where her father treated poor Jewish patients other doctors refused to help.
Irina was furious at the continued discrimination against her Jewish friends.
As a graduate student in social welfare at the University of Warsaw, Sandler publicly denounced segregated classrooms and defaced his non-Jewish ID card—which earned him a reputation for suspension and trouble.
Inspired by his socialist ideals and inspired by his fellow social workers, Sandler helped vulnerable Jewish families in Warsaw, and pushed back the waves of anti-Semitism rising in Europe.
But in September 1939, Nazi Germany invaded Poland, bringing in laws that further eroded Jewish rights. In 1940, Hitler announced that millions of Jews in Warsaw would be forced onto just over a square mile of land.
Surrounded by high walls and subject to constant surveillance,
families living in the Warsaw Ghetto quickly became hungry and sick. Horrified, Sandler and his colleagues obtain passes to the ghetto under the guise of investigating a typhus outbreak.
At first, his group worked to smuggle resources with the help of Polish sympathizers and underground medical personnel. But as desperate parents began sending their children over sewers and over walls, it became clear that to help these people survive, Sandler needed to help them escape.
Sandler and his colleagues developed a coordinated campaign of rescue missions. Children were bundled in dirty laundry, packed into the boxes of cargo trains, and transported under the noses of the Gestapo in coffins, toolboxes, and briefcases.
The older children escaped from the courthouse and the church, which surrounded the ghetto's boundaries. Sandler helped smuggle the children to safe houses, before forging new documents and sending them to orphanages, convents and foster families in Poland.
To maintain her Jewish identity and keep track of each child, Sandler painstakingly kept records on thin cigarette paper and stored them in glass jars.
The punishment for this act was death.
But for Sandler, such consequences pale in comparison to the pain of convincing parents to part ways with their children—often without the promise of reunion. In 1942, the Nazis began deporting Jews from the ghetto to concentration camps.
Sandler acted with renewed urgency, joining forces with a Nazi resistance group called Zygota. Zygota helped Sandler expand his operation by depositing money for himself in post boxes throughout Warsaw.
But this system will also be the downfall of the sender. When the Gestapo threatened a laundry owner whose business included a Zygota post box, he named them Sandler.
At 3 a.m. on October 20, the Gestapo broke into Sandler's apartment and arrested him for helping Jews across the country. Sandler was caught by the police, but his record remained intact.
Janina guards the children's names with her life,
all without knowing if her friend will ever return. Despite enduring months of physical and psychological torture, Sandler did not provide any information.
Disobedient to the end, he was sentenced to be hanged on 20 January 1944. But as she walked to her death, a German officer turned her way.
Zigota paid the Gestapo the modern equivalent of over $100,000 for Sandler's release. That night when he heard the bell horns announcing his death, Sandler's work began anew.
In hiding, she oversaw Zygota rescue missions until Germany's defeat in 1945. After the war, Sandler reconnected with the children she helped escape, and stayed in touch with many throughout her life.
And while Poland's new government tried to suppress his story, the children he saved made sure he was recognized for his work.
Yet for all her soul, Sandler remained reluctant to accept praise for her actions, remarking, "I have a weak conscience that I did very little."
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