The Serious Post
Nov. 11th, 2003 09:26 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
vivienSo today is Veteran's Day, and I always stop to think about the men and women who have sacrificed their time or their lives. Whether I've agreed with the wars they fought in or not, they were (are) still out there doing a crappy job for a miserable reward. While I was growing up, my mom and grandparents were very active in an organization called the Veterans of Foreign Wars (VFW) - my mom is still very active. I went to a few veterans hospitals for Christmas visits where I met men from every war - men who had been there since their first tours of duties, as well as men who ended up there later as a result of injuries or just plain old age. Rant forthcoming: that idiot who is our president has done nothing for the veterans - budget cuts and low funding is just as prevalent in the VA hospitals as it has been. The veterans always get the shaft, and damn it, that makes me furious. So today I think about my grandpa and his time spent in WW2, and I think about the shells of men I met on my volunteer visits and I say thank you, even if no one else really does.
And on the WW2 angle, I read something in Ladies Home Journal (sigh, I know, I am a hopeless square - I've subscribed for years) this weekend that bowled me over. Three girls in a rural Kansas high school were looking for a project to do a history contest project on. Their teacher encourages his students to focus on topics of tolerance and diversity, since their community is anything but. They found a brief article about a Polish woman named Irena Sendler who had rescued 2,500 children from the Warsaw ghetto. They were intruiged so they found out as much about her as they could and wrote a play commemorating her story. In the course of the research, they discovered that she was still alive, living in obscurity in a nursing home in Poland.
It turns out that she had been a social worker before the war, and when the Jews were sent to the Ghetto, she joined the underground group Zegota and pretended to be a nurse in order to get into the Ghetto (under disease control purposes). She and her helpers smuggled children out in suitcases, boxes, even body bags. The children were then sent to orphanages, convents, and foster homes, and Irena made sure to write down each child's name, new Christian name, and new address. She would bury the slips of paper in jars in a friend's yard.
Eventually she was caught and tortured. She was beaten until her legs and feet were broken, but she never said a word. She was sentenced to be executed, and on the day of her execution, Zegota managed to bribe a guard to let her escape. He put her name on the list of those who'd been executed, and she went into hiding for a year until the war was over. Once it was over, she immediately went to the yard, dug up all the jars, and tried to find the children.
She continued working in Poland after the war, although she was permanently disabled from the torture. The girls who wrote the play for their history project finally got to meet her after they'd been touring the area with their play to churches and civic organizations, and someone who'd been touched by the story raised funds for their travel expenses. She told them that she wasn't a hero, she just did what anyone should do.
Now she's gotten some recognition and some monetary help to ease her living conditions. The high school where the girls started all this now hosts a website in Irina's honor, and runs a cast and crew of 17 students to keep performing the play four years later. In the paper today I read that Irina was awarded Poland's highest honor. So I guess that, sometimes, what we do as teachers matter, even if these small acts of ours are overshadowed by the true heroism of those for whom heroism comes as naturally as breathing. I wonder if I would ever be strong enough to fight and be tortured or die for what I believe in. Would I be strong enough to do what this woman did? Would any of us?
ETA: The website is http://www.irenasendler.org and the high school was Uniontown High School in Uniontown, Kansas.
And on the WW2 angle, I read something in Ladies Home Journal (sigh, I know, I am a hopeless square - I've subscribed for years) this weekend that bowled me over. Three girls in a rural Kansas high school were looking for a project to do a history contest project on. Their teacher encourages his students to focus on topics of tolerance and diversity, since their community is anything but. They found a brief article about a Polish woman named Irena Sendler who had rescued 2,500 children from the Warsaw ghetto. They were intruiged so they found out as much about her as they could and wrote a play commemorating her story. In the course of the research, they discovered that she was still alive, living in obscurity in a nursing home in Poland.
It turns out that she had been a social worker before the war, and when the Jews were sent to the Ghetto, she joined the underground group Zegota and pretended to be a nurse in order to get into the Ghetto (under disease control purposes). She and her helpers smuggled children out in suitcases, boxes, even body bags. The children were then sent to orphanages, convents, and foster homes, and Irena made sure to write down each child's name, new Christian name, and new address. She would bury the slips of paper in jars in a friend's yard.
Eventually she was caught and tortured. She was beaten until her legs and feet were broken, but she never said a word. She was sentenced to be executed, and on the day of her execution, Zegota managed to bribe a guard to let her escape. He put her name on the list of those who'd been executed, and she went into hiding for a year until the war was over. Once it was over, she immediately went to the yard, dug up all the jars, and tried to find the children.
She continued working in Poland after the war, although she was permanently disabled from the torture. The girls who wrote the play for their history project finally got to meet her after they'd been touring the area with their play to churches and civic organizations, and someone who'd been touched by the story raised funds for their travel expenses. She told them that she wasn't a hero, she just did what anyone should do.
Now she's gotten some recognition and some monetary help to ease her living conditions. The high school where the girls started all this now hosts a website in Irina's honor, and runs a cast and crew of 17 students to keep performing the play four years later. In the paper today I read that Irina was awarded Poland's highest honor. So I guess that, sometimes, what we do as teachers matter, even if these small acts of ours are overshadowed by the true heroism of those for whom heroism comes as naturally as breathing. I wonder if I would ever be strong enough to fight and be tortured or die for what I believe in. Would I be strong enough to do what this woman did? Would any of us?
ETA: The website is http://www.irenasendler.org and the high school was Uniontown High School in Uniontown, Kansas.
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Date: 2003-11-12 04:42 pm (UTC)My dad served for 4 years in Vietnam and was called a baby killer by some people back in the States. My father is a lot of things but he's no baby killer. What he is, is a hero. Someone who willingly put his life on the line for other people, whether he believed in the "reasons" our country was involved in Vietnam is one thing, but he believed more strongly that his country needed him and he served. He served in the Navy for 21 years and anyone who doesn't respect someone who gave a significant portion of his life to public service at the highest risk level just doesn't get it.