On my desk someone had left a copy of the Ladies Home Journal, opened to an article, “The Woman Who Loved Children.” It was about Irena Sendler and three Kansas teens who uncovered her story. Then, in February 2004, I came into my office one night to see a sick child. World History Archive / Alamy Stock Photo I kept this calendar in a file labeled “Interesting Stuff.” And there it sat for almost three years. They had her birth year wrong (it was 1910, I later found out), and they didn’t know if she was still alive. Even at the USHMM, the preeminent scholars of the Holocaust didn’t know much about Sendler. How could I not know Irena Sendler’s story? Everybody knows Oskar Schindler, who rescued 1,100 Jews from a German concentration camp in Poland and whose story was told in the Steven Spielberg film Schindler’s List. She assumed a new identity and continued her work for Zegota. Arrested by the Gestapo in the fall of 1943, Sendlerowa was sentenced to death. Hiding them in orphanages, convents, schools, hospitals, and private homes, she provided each child with a new identity, carefully recording in code their Jewish names and placements so that surviving relatives could find them after the war. Irena Sendlerowa, (1916–UNKNOWN) As head of the children’s division of Zegota, the Polish underground Council for Aid to Jews, social worker Irena Sendlerowa (code name “Jolanta”) helped smuggle more than 2,500 Jewish children out of the Warsaw ghetto.

I read the short paragraph below the photo: It was the photo that stopped me-a young Irena Sendler, twenty-nine years old, who looked a lot like my niece. As I quickly flipped through, I was brought up short by the November entry. Each year I send a contribution, and they send me a calendar highlighting 12 monthly Holocaust heroes.

Everything had about three seconds to be kept, filed, recycled, or thrown away. This was before the electronic health record, and I daily triaged a prodigious stack of paper. My first brush with this story came in the winter of 2001, in my Middlebury, Vermont, pediatric office, while going through my mail. Three teenagers from rural Kansas helped crack open the silence about the Holocaust in Poland. Liz, Megan, and Sabrina, who began as students of history for a National History Day competition, became recorders of history, championing Sendler’s legacy in Poland, the U.S., and around the world.

She would have remained an unsung hero were it not for three teenage American girls who discovered her forgotten story 60 years later. Almost no one knew of Sendler and her heroism. Sendler and others who rescued Jews during the war kept silent. They were harassed, interrogated, imprisoned, and even executed. After the war, Poland’s Communist government persecuted members of Poland’s wartime resistance, Zegota, of which Sendler was a part.

Is the childrens act a true story