Irena's Jars of Secrets

August 22, 2011
Irena Sendler (1910–2008) was a Polish Catholic social worker who, as a member of the Polish underground organization Zegota, smuggled some 2,500 Jewish children out of the Warsaw ghetto and arranged for them to live out the war with new identities in orphanages, convents, and foster homes. Hoping to reunite the families after the war, she kept lists of the children’s original identities, which she buried in jars under an apple tree. “As more children were rescued, Irena dug up the jars, added their names to the lists, and buried the jars again,” writes Vaughan (Up the Learning Tree). Sendler was ingenious, ushering her young charges to safety by hiding them in “baskets, boxes, tool chests, sacks, and suitcases” and even under the floorboards of an ambulance. And she was fearless, refusing even under torture and the threat of death to reveal the children’s whereabouts. Vaughan and Mazellan (You Can Be a Friend) have created a fine piece of historical storytelling, with brisk, reportorial prose and shadowy, impressionistic oil paintings that offer gripping testimony to the full horror and high stakes of the times. Ages 6–11.

September 15, 2011

Irena Sendler is enshrined at Yad Vashem as "righteous among nations" for her courage in rescuing Jewish children from the Warsaw Ghetto.

Brought up by her parents to respect all people, Irena could not stand by and watch the horrors of Hitler's methodical extermination of the Jews of Warsaw. She worked with a secret underground group to carry out a variety of elaborate deceptions to spirit hundreds of children out of the ghetto to be hidden by other brave gentiles. She kept meticulous records hidden in buried jars because she hoped to reunite the children with their own families at the end of the war, a hope that proved futile because almost all the parents died in the concentration camps. She was captured, tortured and scheduled for execution, but she managed to escape and go into hiding. Finding a way to impart even a small understanding of the Holocaust to children is a task fraught with difficulties: How can anyone comprehend such insanity? Vaughan tells the true story without embellishment, employing stark, unadorned syntax that never wavers into pathos, sentiment or myth. It is a definition of quiet heroism. Mazellan's very dark, deeply shadowed oil paintings capture the unabated terror and sorrow. Children should read this work with an adult who is armed with some knowledge of the material.

Powerful. (afterword, glossary, sources) (Informational picture book. 9-12)

(COPYRIGHT (2011) KIRKUS REVIEWS/NIELSEN BUSINESS MEDIA, INC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.)

November 1, 2011

Gr 4-7-Vaughan's biography in picture-book format details the heroic deeds of Irena Sendler, a Polish Catholic social worker who helped save nearly 2500 children from extermination. In 1940, when German soldiers confined Warsaw's 400,000 Jews to a neighborhood of rundown apartment buildings surrounded by a high brick wall, Sendler remembered her father's words about the necessity of risking one's own life in order to save others. Her position as a senior administrator in the Warsaw Social Welfare Department allowed her to enter the ghetto to check sanitary conditions, and to sneak in food, medicine, and money. She joined the underground organization Zegota (the Council for Aid to Jews), whose members worked with her and other social workers to smuggle children out of the ghetto. Vaughan describes the incredibly dangerous methods used to rescue several children. As she promised their parents, Sendler kept lists of the children's real names, false identities, and whereabouts (convents, orphanages, foster homes), which she buried in glass jars in a friend's garden; when the war ended, she provided these lists to the Jewish National Committee, an organization that searched for and reunited relatives, and placed parentless children with other families. Mazellan's dramatic oil paintings-mostly in appropriate dark, somber grays and browns-cover most of each spread, leaving a buff-colored strip to hold the succinctly written, yet descriptive, text that can be understood even by those who have little or no knowledge of World War II or the Holocaust. A two-page recap that includes the impressive awards and honors bestowed upon Sendler is appended.-Susan Scheps, Shaker Heights Public Library, OH

Copyright 2011 School Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

December 1, 2011
Grades 4-7 Rescue stories are the light in the dark horror of the Holocaust, but only when they do not deny the truth of what the rescued escaped from. With dark oil paintings, this picture-book biography tells of Polish Catholic social worker Irena Sendler, who was part of an underground network that smuggled hidden Jewish children out of the Warsaw Ghetto and saved them from deportation to the death camps. Some thoughts, feelings, and dialogue are fictionalized, but the basic facts of the gripping stories are true, and the dramatic artwork shows how children were smuggled to safety in baskets, tool chests, suitcases, and more. Betrayed, Sendler was arrested by the Gestapo, but she kept her silence, even under torture. The title refers to her promise to keep records of the rescued children and reunite families, and she buried jars with her notes. After the war, she did dig up the records, but though most of the children had survived, nearly all their parents had not. A long afterword closes this important addition to the Holocaust curriculum.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2011, American Library Association.)