IRENA SENDLER: RESCUING THE RESCUER at Freight & Salvage, Sat, 10/7

"I did nothing special. Any decent person would do the same thing under the circumstances. When somebody is drowning, you reach in to save them whether you can swim or not. Race, religion, nationality don't matter.” These are the words of Irena Sendler, a Polish Catholic social worker who successfully rescued 2,500 Jewish children from certain death during WWII by organizing an underground network that begged mothers in the Jewish ghetto to give up their children for a chance of survival outside ghetto walls. She then found foster homes and orphanages for all 2,500 of them.

Sendler was eventually arrested, imprisoned and tortured by the Nazis. On the day of her execution, her network bribed a prison guard for her release. She lived out the rest of the war in hiding, and after that in relative obscurity behind the Iron Curtain. In 1965, Yad Vashem honored her with a Righteous Gentile Medal for her work, while her story remained otherwise unknown and forgotten.

Then one day in 1999, Kansas high school students stumbled upon a brief mention of her in an old magazine clipping. Eager to learn more, they scoured libraries and Holocaust centers but could find no mention of her except on the Yad Vashem website. Undaunted, they wrote a 10-minute award-winning play for National History Day called Life in a Jar, referring to the lists Sendler buried in jars for safekeeping from the Nazis with names and addresses of the children, always intending to reunite them with their families after the war.

In their research, the students were amazed to discover from Yad Vashem, that Irena Sendler was still alive and living in Warsaw. A moving correspondence and friendship began between the students and Sendler, which continued until her death in 2008. It included several trips to Warsaw, initially funded by members of a Kansas City synagogue. The students' play drew international attention to Sendler's work, and eventually led to her 2007 Nobel Peace Prize nomination.

I first learned about the story in 2015, when I was invited to a book talk for Jack Mayer's Life in a Jar at the Jewish Heritage Museum in New York. One of the presenters was Norman Conard, the Kansas high school history teacher who mentored his students through the creation of their play project for National History Day. Inspired by its profound outcome, Mr. Conard is now founding director of Life in a Jar Foundation / The Irena Sendler Project and the Lowell Milken Center for Unsung Heroes, an organization working to transform communities through student-driven projects celebrating unsung heroes whose lives illustrate the power of one to create positive change.

I had the pleasure of meeting Mr. Conard after the book talk. In the course of our conversation, I mentioned my brother-in-law is a high school history teacher whose career began in Kansas. He asked what I do. "I perform a trilogy of one-person shows about family members who fled the Third Reich."

He suggested I develop a one-woman show about Irena Sendler. We exchanged cards. He sent me a Facebook friend request and we discovered a friend in common - my brother-in-law, the high school history teacher from Kansas! He invited me to Kansas to visit his Center in Fort Scott and meet his former student Megan Stewart Felt, now program director, as well as to further delve into the story of Irena Sendler's relationship with his students. I took him up it.

The result is Irena Sendler: Rescuing the Rescuer, a one-woman show portraying the story through a kaleidoscope of characters - two of the Kansas students, their history teacher, Irena's children and mother, a neighbor, a co-worker, a mother superior at an orphanage, a rescued child now an adult, and Irena herself. My husband Steve May composed violin music which he performs throughout the show.

We will be performing Irena Sendler: Rescuing the Rescuer at Freight & Salvage Coffeehouse on Saturday, October 7 at 2pm. An audience talk-back will follow. Tickets are available at www.ticketf.ly/2x3qois.

Special thanks to Life in a Jar Foundation: www.IrenaSendler.org.