Kansans find more than fame telling Holocaust hero’s story

Irena Sendler had been
nominated for a Peace Prize last year.

FORT SCOTT, Kan. (AP) — It was just an old clip from a magazine with a list of names that several students had dismissed as too obscure, too hard to research.

But, somehow, in 1999 when it got into the hands of a few teenage girls from rural southeast Kansas, that little clip started changing lives. It also gave those girls — now women — good reason to watch closely as last year’s Nobel Peace Prize was announced.

“How would our lives be different without all of this? Oh my gosh, this could take all day,” said Norm Conard, the Uniontown High School teacher who provided the clip in September 1999 and has guided the students through years of travel, performances and interviews.

On the clip were names of Holocaust heroes, one of whom caught the students’ attention. Irena Sendler, it said, helped rescue 2,500 children from the Warsaw ghetto during the Holocaust more than 60 years ago.

“We thought maybe it was a typo,” said Megan Felt, who was a freshman that year and read the clip along with Sabrina Murphy and Elizabeth Cambers Hutton. “Even Oskar Schindler saved only about 1,000 Jews, and he was really well known.”

A Web search gave the girls little information about Sendler. But they had chosen her for their history research project, and so they persevered.

The girls dug up what they could and wrote a short play about her. They told how Sendler, a Catholic, sneaked into the Warsaw ghetto at great risk to herself, and took children from doomed Jewish families, smuggled them out and placed them with Catholic families, convents or orphanages.

As she worked, Sendler wrote down the name of each child and some family history and stuffed the information into milk jars she buried in a neighbor’s yard. Her hope was that those names would be unearthed and used to piece families back together when the killing ended.

They called their play “Life in a Jar” and performed it well past high school graduation. The count is up to about 230 performances across the U.S., Canada and Poland. The cast has changed and grown, as has the length of the play, now about a half-hour.

But at each performance, still, cast members carry tissues because afterward there will be stories from the audience of such loss and sorrow.

“We cry a lot,” Conard says.

The students drew national attention with their devotion to Sendler, whom they have visited three times in Warsaw. The young women, most of whom did not have passports and did not know any Jewish people when they started the project, have met diplomats and survivors, and have been interviewed by national media. They have seen Auschwitz and Treblinka, and they have been greeted by photographers at the Warsaw airport.

They were dubbed the “Rescuers of the Rescuer,” because before their attention, Sendler was not well known in Poland.

“It’s just a passion,” said Jessica Ripper, 22, who joined the effort in 2000. “It is something started as just a history project. But we fell in love, and throughout the years, it has become an everyday part of our lives, to share her story and try to change the world.”

Since they began their research, Sendler, 97, has become considerably better known, and was nominated last year for the Nobel Peace Prize. She lost to the team of Al Gore and the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and their efforts to draw attention to global warming.

“I honestly didn’t think she would get it because the Peace Prize is for work in the past year,” said Murphy, 24. “But I hoped she would.”

Others had praised Sendler. She was recognized by Israel in 1965 for rescuing Jewish children. And The Jewish Foundation for the Righteous has been sending Sendler money and promoting her heroism since 1986, said Stanlee J. Stahl, executive vice president of the New York-based foundation.