Otwock - the town of the righteous

On the 12th of May, there was the second anniversary of the death of Irena Sendler – the Righteous among the Nations. During the Second World War, she saved 2,500 Jewish children. She spent her childhood in Otwock, a town of many cultures.
During the Nazi occupation, Irena Sendler was employed as a social worker. Disguised as a nurse, she smuggled food, medicines and money to the Warsaw Ghetto. Poland, which was occupied by the Nazi Germany during the war, was the only country where helping Jews was punishable by death. Despite this, after the occupying authorities decided to liquidate the Jewish district in Warsaw, Irena Sendler and her colleagues started evacuation of Jewish children and hid them in Polish families, orphanages and convents. Information of their real identity was encrypted, placed in jars and buried in gardens. In this way, the lives of 2,500 children were saved. From autumn 1943, Irena Sendler was the head of the Children’s Department of the „Żegota” Council to Aid Jews. On the 20th of October 1943, she was arrested by the Gestapo and subjected to torture in the Pawiak prison. It was only because of a bribe paid by „Żegota” that she escaped death by firing squad. After 1945, she worked in the welfare department of the Warsaw authorities. She opened numerous children’s homes, old people’s homes and emergency shelters for children.
For her services, in 1965 Irena Sendler was awarded the title of the Righteous among the Nations. Due to poor health, she spent her childhood in Otwock, where over a dozen thousand Jews lived at the time. In the years 1914-1920, she lived in a house at 21 Kościuszki Street which survived until now. Her father, Stanisław Krzyżanowski was a doctor who worked in Doctor Wiśniewski’s sanatorium. He never refused anybody his help, although many of his patients were poor Jews who could not afford medical advice. During the First World War, he was the only doctor in the vicinity who treated people infected with typhus. He caught the disease from his patients and died on the 10th of February 1917. Irena Sendler inherited sensitivity to other people’s suffering from her father. In the interviews she gave at the end of her life, she stressed that she had learned to help others from him.
Otwock, as the town where Irena Sendler spent her childhood, decided to pay tribute to her. A month after the 100th anniversary of her birth, on the 15th of March 2010, the Year of Irena Sendler, who is also called the Mother of the Holocaust Children, was inaugurated. During a special session of the Town Council, she was officially awarded the title of the Honorary Citizen of Otwock together with the symbolic keys to the town, which were taken on her behalf by her daughter Janina Zgrzembska. Moreover, one of the secondary schools in Otwock – Gimnazjum No 2 has been named after Irena Sendler.
We do invite all of you to Otwock, the town of the childhood of the Righteous among the Nations and the Mother of the Holocaust Children. This town, with its multiculturalism, undoubtedly influenced her personality. Although its Jewish inhabitants disappeared as a result of the tragic events of the war, the traces of all those years where the Polish and Jewish cultures coexisted there can be found until now.

Urzad Miasta Otwocka
ul. Armii Krajowej 5
05-400 Otwock
tel. 22779 20 01
fax 22779 42 25
umotwock@otwock.pl
www.otwock.p