WARSAW, Poland – Elzbieta Ficowska leaned forward to place red roses on a new grave in Warsaw’s Powawazki Cemetery. The 66-year-old woman also lit two votive candles.
They were in memory of Irena Sendler, the person to whom she owes her very existence.
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| NBC News/ Krzysztof Galica |
| Elzbieta Ficowska places flowers on the grave of Irena Sendler at a cemetary in Warsaw, Poland. |
Sendler, a Roman Catholic social worker, risked her life and survived torture to help save thousands of Jews after the 1939 German invasion of Poland. Sendler, who died earlier this year at the age of 98, led a group of 30 volunteers, the majority of them women, who managed to smuggle 2,500 Jewish children out of the Warsaw ghetto and gave them false identities.
‘A truly heroic act’
Ficowska was spirited out of the ghetto in a wooden carpenter’s box when she was just six months old. Hidden on a truck beneath a pile of bricks – arranged to allow air to reach her – she had been drugged to prevent her from crying. With her in the box was a silver spoon engraved with her name and date of birth, probably put there by the mother she never knew.
“It was a truly heroic act for my mother to give away her baby with no guarantee it would survive,” Ficowska said. “That was the painful decision my mother made.” She did so because thousands of Jews were being sent each day to the gas chambers at Treblinka and other death camps in occupied Poland.
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