There are stories that must be told. These are stories which change the world: they have the rare and precious power to change the lives of those who tell them and those who listen to them. The stories of Irena Sendler and Giorgio Perlasca are magical in this regard. They sound like fairy tales in their beauty, although they are true. What they have in common is their power to recount the choices and actions of a woman and a man who consciously chose to put their creative intelligence into action to the service of destiny. They decided to make up an entirely new destiny, saving the lives of thousands of Polish children and Hungarian families during one of the darkest times of European history. They show us that, when creativity bonds with fate, unthinkable things happen: the order of the real world opens up to a higher spiritual space where the impossible meets the possible.
The stories of Irena Sendler and Giorgio Perlasca are similar to that of Oskar Schindler: they must be recounted because they radically change our representation of the Holocaust. They help us remember that, even when the “utmost evil” seems to prevail, humane possibilities virtually bloom at the same time, such are the cases of this beautiful young Polish woman and this Italian diplomat who choose to transform himself into a fake Spanish consul in Budapest in 1944.
Irena was born in 1910 in Warsaw, Poland. When World War II broke out in 1939, she worked in social services. She worked to protect her Jewish friends in Warsaw from the very beginning. In 1940, the Ghetto was erected and Irena began to walk into it with various excuses: including inspections to check out potential typhoid fever symptoms and water pipes checks. The excuses varied, but not her actual intent: Irena moved dozens of children of all ages out of the Ghetto, sparing them from certain death. She hid newborns in trucks’ boxes and older kids into iuta bags. She trained her dog to bark whenever the Germans showed up in order to cover up the cries of despair of those children who had been taken away from their parents. Irena would later explain that the true heroes were those mothers and fathers who gave her their children, sparing them from the hard life in the ghetto, hoping to reunite with them in the future. Irena succeeded in saving 2500 children.
How many journeys did she carry out to take away so many children? Not all the children were in the ghetto: many of them were residing in orphanages. Irena abducted them and gave them new identities. She brought them to families and Catholic priests. The children lived to adulthood.
Irena’s dream was to return those children to their families of origin one day. She therefore hid slips of papers with their families’ names into jam jars, and she buried them in her yard. The Gestapo caught her. She was tortured and both her arms and legs were fractured, but Irena kept her secret. She was sentenced to death, but the Polish Resistance succeeded in freeing her through the undercover organization ZEGOTA, bribing some German soldiers. At the end of the war those jars were retrieved by Irena and utilized to contact 2000 children. In most cases, their families had been exterminated.
In 1965, her name was listed at Yad Vashem among the “The Just Among Nations,” and in 1983, a tree was planted in the museum’s garden in Israel in her honor. Yet, Irena’s story had been forgotten for many years by the general public until a group of students from Kansas discovered and shared it in 1999. They founded a project to disseminate this story. “Life in a Jar” became a show, a book and a DVD. The story of this project can be found on www.irenasendler.org. In 2007, Irena was a nominee for the Peace Nobel Prize, but she couldn’t be awarded it because one of the rules to be bestowed the prize is to carry out some meritorious activity two year prior to the nomination. On May 12, 2008, this woman with a sweet and round face, passed away in Warsaw.
Over the last decades, the film industry has decisively contributed to public understanding of the complex history of the Holocaust, which we would not have been aware of otherwise. The most famous example is Schindler’s List by Steven Spielberg: it made the story of Oskar Schindler known throughout the world. There also was a more modest effort in the case of Sendler and another similar example in one made about Giorgio Perlasca, in 2002 by Rai Fiction and France 2.
Giorgio Perlasca was born in Como, Italy, in 1910. During World War II, he was an Italian diplomatic envoy to the countries of Eastern Europe as a food purchasing manager (meat) for the Italian Army. For a number of reasons, he found himself in the position to pretend to be a substitute for the Spanish ambassador in Budapest, Sanz Briz. When the ambassador was forced to leave Hungary, Perlasca decided to impersonate a Spanish consul in order to grant Spanish citizenship to thousands of Jewish Hungarians. He took advantage of the Rivera Law, which allowed him to naturalize all the Jewish people with Sephardi origins from all over the world. Thanks to this law, over a period of 45 days, between January 1944 and January 1945, “Jorge” Perlasca saved thousands of Hungarian Jews.
After the Red Army conquered Budapest, Giorgio Perlasca successfully returned to Italy, but he never told anyone about what he had done, including his family. He was a very reserved man. Nonetheless, a few years later some Hungarian girls went on a quest for the Spanish consul who had saved them: Giorgio Perlasca. This way the story about the brave and modest Italian diplomat came to light.
Our public knowledge about the Holocaust has radically changed. Because of these stories – along with the representations of a fierce Nazi executioner and the Jewish and non-Jewish victims – we have been able to collocate new images, new figures, the figures of those who did not want to just sit and look, those who did not allow it to happen, those who decided to risk and resist.
Giorgio Perlasca and Irena Sendler are a man and a woman who found within themselves the power, strength and creativity to change the course of events, and they simply did it, accepting the risks and willing to bear the costs of their choices. Irena was a most beautiful and courageous woman. Giorgio was a brave and reserved man. Their memory is a precious public good linking a horrific past to the possibility of a more hopeful future.
Leave a Reply