The Courageous Heart of Irena Sendler

What a terrific role, wonderful actress.


Heroic. One of the more sung heroes now, thanks to CBS and Hallmark.


And these are the Desperate Housewives, who really don't belong on the same page as Irena Sendler, but well, you'll see. Nicolette Sheridan, far right, plays Edie Britt.

I know I promised you something on exposure therapies, but something came up and I had to tell you about it. And it’s ironic, of course, because it’s about the Holocaust, and if ever a population suffered from post traumatic stress, one of the disorders we use exposure therapies to ameliorate, survivors of the Holocaust qualify.

And yet, exposure therapies, I believe, might be over the top for Holocaust survivors, cruel and maladaptive. But I'll explain all that another day. I could be wrong though, I really could. I'm not the expert here, not on Holocaust survivors.

Tomorrow, April 21, 2009 is Holocaust Remembrance Day.

So let’s use this time to remember, just a little.

FIRST A STORY

This one has nothing to do with the Holocaust. If you’ve been watching my sidebar then you see me Twitter every once in a while. I don’t do it much, like I don’t blog all that much lately, but every now and again I get the urge to tweet.

My tweets have been about preparing for a Jewish holiday, mainly about how labor intensive it is, Passover. We change over all of the kitchen utensils and appliances in the house, use different dishes, different silverware, different everything, old sets of things that feel new because they are set aside year after year, not used at all, save this one holiday.

We clean the whole house from top to bottom and the work part, if you're not familiar with it, the preparation, is spring cleaning with an attitude, reminds us of slavery in Egypt, for sure, and is all about leavening, and getting it out of the system, mental, mainly, although most of us bread lovers complain about the matzah substitute. But complaining is in our nature, and for eight days, we can and should live without something, something like leavening.

The more observant among us take off as much time as we can from our jobs to celebrate when the holiday finally arrives, definitely the first and last two days and the Sabbath in the middle. But it is laudable to take off all eight of those days, because, you know, let's talk, it's a waste not to celebrate a perfectly good festival.

So in my house, this year, like every year usually, Passover passed uneventfully. Passover comes, it goes, and life goes on. But as we’re getting our lives back to normal, changing back from the Passover dishes to the every day dishes, putting things away, FD can’t help but notice that one of our sets of silverware is looking a little yellow.

The silver plate's looking a little yellow, he tells me.

It’s not pretty, yellowing silver plate. I can assure you.

Silver plate flatware isn’t all that expensive, not much more than stainless steel, if at all, but when you shine it up, it looks like real silver. And I happen to be a real sucker for shiny things, shine things up as a general rule. Like I don't mind doing dishes, or washing glassware, or silverware. And you know my world view tends to get a little glossy at times.

If you read this blog regularly then you also know that a lot of us find it therapeutic to shine things up. You don’t have to be OCD to like things clean, we're talking literally now. On the other hand, you might be.

Anyway, I told FD that indeed I had noticed that the silverware needed polishing, but didn’t want to do it just then. There would be a good time, there always is. Story End.

Then tonight, wouldn't you know, ready to polish up the post on exposure therapies, CBS features a Hallmark presentation, a present, really, The Courageous Heart of Irena Sendler. Irena Sendler, who just passed away at 98 in May, 2008, was a Christian social worker in Germany during the second world war.

There haven’t been all that many TV shows or made for TV movies about social workers. When I was a kid George C. Scott played one on East Side West Side, and more recently, Tyne Daly played a tough cookie, a social worker with chutzpah and heart on Judging Amy. I loved the show, but most people probably didn’t.

There’s a nice treatment of social workers in the media by Robert DeLauro, MSW in Social Work Today. Not terribly flattering, to tell you the truth, pre Judging Amy, for sure.

But never in a million years would I have known about social worker Irena Sendler were it not for this teledrama. Sure, it’s Hollywood--gorgeous movie stars play regular, probably not so gorgeous people, but the sets seemed real to me, and that scene where the kid punches a hole through the floor of a moving rail car and drops to the tracks to face life alone (or so he thinks) in the wintry woods of Poland, now THAT’S good television.

But basically it's a made for TV production that serves its purpose, sucks the tears right out of you, unless you have no heart.

But we should cry for such things.

I’ll admit it was a tough choice. A really key new episode of Desperate Housewives, serious competition, especially since I wasn’t sure I had the stomach for a Holocaust movie this evening. Who ever does?

And yet how could I not watch it? I feel the survivor guilt of any decent liberal. If I’m not suffering, then why not?

I like to think that having been born in the fifties, those years following the destruction of six to ten million or more innocents by monsters, for there is no other word, I’m sorry, to describe the Nazis, that after the war the soul of an innocent Jew, one who suffered and didn’t make it out of Europe in the early 40's, who didn’t survive, somehow got recycled into my zygote, ultimately this ol' bod. That may sound crazy, but the timing is just right.

And timing, as you know, is everything.

And this being two days prior to Holocaust Remembrance Day, having to choose between Irena’s courageous heart and Edie Britt’s electrocution in an automobile accident on Desperate, well, really, it wasn't a contest. The electrocution might have upset me too, come to think of it.

Ms. Sendler, it turns out, is more than your basic do-gooder social worker. In 1939 she's the director of Polish Social Services in Warsaw but considers the children in the Warsaw ghetto, rationed down to 300 calories a day by the Germans, her cause.

Her own mother worries about her safety, begs Irena to pick another cause.

Irena: I have to save these children.

Mom: You are a social worker a good social worker. Why go risking everything for something you know nothing about?

Irena: If you see a man drowning, you have to try to rescue him even if you don’t know how to swim.

Convincing her mother isn’t all that tough, but convincing Jewish parents to let their children go, well, that's quite another matter.

Irena: The new camp the Germans are building for deportation. . . Treblinka. . .they. . .

Jewish mother in the Warsaw ghetto: It is a concentration camp, a work camp.

Irena: They’re not building any barracks for this camp.

Jewish father in the ghetto: Why wouldn’t they build barracks? I don't understand.

Irena: Treblinka is a place for killing. It is a death camp. There won’t be a need for beds.

Ultimately these protective parents get the idea that it is better to take your chance on the kindness of strangers than to trust the Nazis.

So Tuesday is Holocaust Remembrance Day. We’ll observe a moment of silence, remember things like when we hear words like genocide, that we should wake up, pay attention. DO something. Give money to our local Simon Wiesanthal Center my Uncle Max would like that, or the Holocaust Museum in D.C., something that gives memory its due.

We should be a little more like Ms. Sendler, irrepressible, righteous, brave. Contemplate, at least, what it must be like to be someone like her. Wonder about that.

FD and my son talk a little, after the show, about what they have just seen, the dramatization, their thoughts about that nomination Irena Sendler received for a Nobel Peace Prize in 2007, having lost the prize to Al Gore. How must he feel?

I saunter out of the family room to the kitchen, get up on a chair and find the silver polish. Not that I'm anything like Golda Meir, the first female Prime Minister of Israel, but it's what she would do, I'm pretty sure, under the circumstances. They say she polished silverware when she got depressed.*

Makes sense to me.

therapydoc

*I'm not depressed, I'm really not. But one day, long ago, having heard that story about Ms. Meir, it changed my whole way of thinking about silver and polishing. Not that I don't farm out the job to an available man now and again. Technically, it is a guy job. For the record.

More facts about Ms. Sendler from the Internet. I understand Snopes argues a few of them.

These are from Life in A Jar, the Irena Sendler Project. http://www.irenasendler.org/facts.asp ,

As early as 1939, when the Germans invaded Warsaw, Irena began helping Jews by offering them food and shelter.

The Warsaw Ghetto, built in 1940, was the size of New York’s Central Park. Four hundred fifty thousand Jews were forced to live there.

When the Warsaw Ghetto was erected in 1940, Irena could no longer help isolated Jews. The Ghetto was an area the size of New York's Central Park and 450,000 Jewish people were forced into this area.

Irena and the ten who went with her into the ghetto, used many, many methods to smuggle children out. There were five main means of escape: 1- using an ambulance a child could be taken out hidden under the stretcher. 2 - escape through the courthouse. 3 - a child could be taken out using the sewer pipes or other secret underground passages. 4- A trolley could carry out children hiding in a sack, in a trunk, a suitcase or something similar. 5 - if a child could pretend to be sick or was actually very ill, it could be legally removed using the ambulance. The number of babies saved was small in relation to the total number of children rescued.

There was a church next to the ghetto, but the entrance leading to it was "sealed" by the Germans. If a child could speak good Polish and rattle off some Christian prayers it could be smuggled in through the "sealed" entrance and later taken to the Aryan side. This was very dangerous since Germans often used a rouse to trick the Poles and then arrest Jolanta/Irena documented on the strips of paper she had buried, as well as where the child was taken in the first phase of its escape.

Irena (code name Jolanta) was arrested on October 20, 1943. She was placed in the notorious Piawiak prison, where she was constantly questioned and tortured. During the questioning she had her legs and feet fractured.

The German who interrogated her was young, very stylish and spoke perfect Polish. He wanted the names of the Zegota leaders, their addresses and the names of others involved. Irena fed him the version that she and her collaborators had prepared in the event they were captured. The German held up a folder with information of places, times and persons who had informed on her. She received a death sentence. She was to be shot. Unbeknown to her, Zegota had bribed the German executioner who helped her escape. On the following day the Germans loudly proclaimed her execution. Posters were put up all over the city with the news that she was shot. Irena read the posters herself.

During the remaining years of the war, she lived hidden, just like the children she rescued. Irena was the only one who knew where the children were to be found. When the war was finally over, she dug up the bottles and began the job of finding the children and trying to find a living parent.

Almost all the parents of the children Irena saved, died at the Treblinka death camp.

Working it out

Settle back. We're talking on the order of That Bruise on the Face one of the more intimate posts (January 31, 2007).

Meaning this one's embarrassing.
As in,

Do I write about this? Shouldn't I be embarrassed about this? What will my friends think? Won't my mother worry? Shouldn't I worry? Such a clutz to let this happen.

Aw, here's the story.

On Thursday nights I usually try to let everything else go, concentrate on cooking and baking for Shabas, the Jewish sabbath, which begins on Friday an hour before sundown whether we're ready for it or not. We can't do any cooking, no work once the bell rings, metaphorically speaking, although there is a siren in Jerusalem. In truth, after candle-lighting, all semblance of work stops.

I love it, the Thursday night preparation. I cook, talk on the phone, blast the radio, maybe take a break to watch The Office when there isn't a writer's strike. FD is playing basketball or at shul or both. Friday will be a work day and although leaving work early enables me to get most everything done by sundown, it's soothing to know that the meal's in the bag, the table's set, the chala baked, everything's ready. There's less pressure. It's terrible being so neurotic, but if you live your life on Jewish time, there's no alternative.

Sometimes I have it so in the bag there's time for a manicure on Friday afternoon. Right, and if you believe that. . .

No, really. And in the summer, when sundown is really late, I'll grab FD and we'll take in a movie on a Friday afternoon. Now that's fabulous.

Anyway, back to the story.

We've got a simple 4-burner range, a GE self-cleaning electric double oven, that was popular in the eighties. The smaller of the two ovens hangs about 11 inches above the range that's just above the larger of the two ovens. The thing looks a little like a crane, like it belongs on a construction site.

Sometimes having that smaller oven just above the stove makes cooking a little awkward, too. You can't get to the back burners easily and have to remove a pot from the burner to see what's going on inside. Tasting can be a challenge. You stick that big spoon in there and inevitably spill the soup on the way to your mouth.

So Thursday night I started a lovely vegetable stir fry on the right front burner and was about to make some popcorn. For corn I use the left back burner, the most powerful, reliable, if less accessible burner on the stove. This stove is about 22 years old, so the thermostats require a little mental accommodation. But if I want to cook something fast, I'll use that back burner, the one that always works and burns consistently hot like it should.

I added the oil to a 6 quart pot that I use mainly for popcorn, but didn't add the corn.

Somehow I got it into my head to check comments on the blog.

New metaphor for life and foreshadowing: You don't see electricity unless it's glowing.

So I get that urge to check comments and go upstairs, log on, scan the mail. I don't know about you, but when I post a comment, I might visit the person who commented if she/he has a blog, read a little. I love this stuff, love this community.

Suddenly I hear a crackling sound. That's all I can say. It's literally crackling. Something's crackling. I rush downstairs, worrying about my stir fry even though I'm sure I left it barely simmering. But I'm wondering, "What's That Noise?"

There's a foot of smoke under the ceiling in the living and dining rooms.

That noise is fire. It's always fire. You know it, you really do, before you see the smoke.

I dash into the kitchen, scared but tough, not panicked. It's surreal. There, on the stove, I've got a bonfire going in the popcorn pot. I'd left that burner ON, obviously, and the oil did what oil will do. A bonfire is blazing on the stove, flames licking upwards to the top oven.

You could have roasted marshmallows in that thing. Forget marshmallows. You could have roasted a chicken. It's smoking, flaming eight by 15 inches within and above the pot.

Plus, the top stove caught, the fan's ventilation grate is dripping flames. Apparently I don't clean as well as I think because the oil on that grate caught mightily. The fire glowed right through. That was the Extra Crackle. This is fire.

I grabbed for the salt. My mother taught me long ago to use salt to put out fires, and it works. I've put out lesser fires in the kitchen, the types most of us have if we're not careful when oil splatters. (I use a lot. The kids joke that if I can't stir fry something, then I won't bother eating it, and there is a grain of truth to that, except for a baked potatoes with butter. You know about my sandwiches already).

I completely forgot about the fire extinguisher, but the salt worked.

And I spent the evening washing walls, ceilings, cleaning the stove. It was penance, surely, for my carelessness, and many times I thought to myself, Am I losing it? What's wrong here? Can I even tell anyone about this? I'm so embarrassed.

FD came home and I told him. He said, "Yeah, you have this tendency of cooking and leaving the stove. Maybe it's not a good idea, huh?" Then he raised an eyebrow. "So what distracted you this time?"

I could end this right there, of course. But I won't.

The stir fry, you should know, survived. It was really good, too. I was careful about throwing the salt, didn't want needless clean-up. And food is food. We don't waste it.

We were actually invited out for Friday night dinner. I was bringing over the veges, a sliver of a Friday night Shabas meal that's generally a 12 course spread. There's nothing more wonderful, by the way, than having one of your kids cook for you. Cham did an amazing, amazing job, and it's rumored that Duv helped, too. I saw him cutting the melon.

Anyway, I found myself telling the story about the fire at the Shabas table. This wasn't my intention, you should know. And as I'm telling the story I'm aware that I'm still working it out. I'm doing what we all do in therapy when we tell over something traumatic. We work it out. Get rid of it. Leave it, leave some of it, at least, somewhere else. Even knowing that the story made me look like a scatter-brained, terrifically flawed individual, I HAD to tell it.

Big deal, right? By repeating stories, word for word, sometimes over and over again, we work them out.

Now. That's the psychological piece.

But a religious person has an even greater test, a more important mind-game to wrestle when something bad happens. Just getting rid of traumatic events, purging them from the psyche by telling them over so often that the brain literally gets bored isn't enough. Stories will lose their intensity on the twentieth take, usually, so retelling works for post traumatic or acute trauma disorders. Wonderful. But. . .

It's not rich.

Indeed, it can become a So What if you let it. For some people the There but for the grace of G-d go I thing means Take a deeper look.

A religious person will look at something bad that's happened in two ways. (Wait a minute. Now that I think about it, you don't have to be a religious person at all to think about it in these two ways!)

Okay, so I take that back. Everyone can look at an occasional traumatic event in the following two ways. It's called making cognitive sense out of the trauma. Again, mastery.

(a) What am I supposed to learn from this? (b) What does it mean for all of humanity?

Notice I didn't add, (c) What did I do wrong to bring this on? or Why am I being punished?

It's really not up to me to tell you that the Old Mighty isn't punishing you when things go south. How am I supposed to know? I personally think, however, that it's more functional and accomplishes the same purpose to ask, What am I supposed to learn from this?

I'm not going to tell you the things that went through my head on Thursday night after the fire, but they weren't too far off from Don't Leave the Kitchen When You Have Something on the Stove. I'm not very deep when it comes to self-reflection.

But the bigger question, the one about humanity hit me at the synagogue this morning as that image burned itself deeper into my imagination, that vision of fire on the stove, the distinct crackle of burning metal.

Fire, destructive fire, should make us think. Maybe about ourselves, and how we should be more careful in general, but maybe simply about the BIG FIRES, how people use fire destructively.

I'm thinking about the fires that blazed in Europe during various regimes, over several centuries, burning martyrs a stake and books and scrolls, and even ordinary people, too, culminating with the ovens, the crematoriums of WWII.

Or the fires that blazed across the South when the KKK burned down homes, burned(s) crosses in the name of White Supremacy.

This kind of insanity still reigns. Terrorists make fires. They bomb buses, restaurants, hotels, ships, embassies. Suicide bombers burn people. Is this culture ever going to die down? I'd like to know.

So yeah, sure, it starts with a kitchen fire, and now it's an anti-terrorism rant, ostensibly to educate young children not to blow themselves up in the name of . . .what? There are these anti-terrorism campaigns going on. We should support them. I'm voting for the first candidate who talks about re-educating would-be, wanna-be terrorists (blee neder, no promises on the vote thing).

Catastrophes happen, often intentionally. My little kitchen fire is nothing. It's only something to me because as I wipe the soot off the kitchen ceiling (I'm not finished) and am thinking we'll have to paint again, I have to say to myself, perhaps pray, Lo Aleinu.* No more.

The good news, of course, is that the pot is about as kosher as it's ever going to get.**

copyright 2008, therapydoc

*Lo Aleinu means, It shouldn't happen to us.
**One of the ways of making a cooking utensil kosher is by heating it until it glows. Jews use blow torches for Passover, a closet pyromaniac's favorite holiday.

A Moment of Silence

I woke up a little early this morning and thought,

Something’s going on.

Don’t know why, just had that feeling. So I threw on some sweats and trudged downstairs to make the coffee, flipped on the radio. No. Nothing’s going on. Snow in the east, poor Dovid and Cham.

Slipped into the family room to check out the television news.
Ah, ha. I KNEW IT. Even though I read several Jewish-Israeli blogs last night (there are thousands of them, Jews have a lot of words), I missed it!

Today is Holocaust Remembrance Day.

What’s that mean?

Well, I was there, so I know. No, I wasn’t alive during World War II unless you believe that the souls of the victims of the Holocaust were recycled and those of us who were born after the war and are alive today are vessels. Which is plausible.

But I refer to being in Israel on a Holocaust Remembrance Day.

I remember that feeling when the sirens sounded throughout the country and life came to a standstill, literally, as millions of Israelis stopped whatever it was they were doing at 10 a.m. Buses stopped in the streets, cars on major highways, shoppers put down their bags, merchants stopped selling, balcony rug-shakers stopped shaking. Everyone stopped to pay respect to 6 million killed by the Nazis. That moment of silence is for remembering.

It’s a powerful, chilling.

Holidays in Israel start the night before, as does the Day of Remembrance. Last night, according to the Jerusalem Post (www.JPost.com) the Knesset, the legislative arm of the government, began its Holocaust Remembrance Day ceremony, "To Each a Name." Ministers and members of Knesset read names of victims.

Quotes from President Dalia Itzik’s speech:

“The Holocaust proved evil can be organized," said Itzik. "The world needs to beware, and remember that the Nazis were human beings. The atrocities were created by people. The Holocaust is an "Ot Kain", a stain on humanity."

"There are no words that can explain the horror of the Shoah. Only the testimonies, silent and spoken can attain to this atrocity," said Itzik.

Prime Minister Ehud Olmert reminds us:

"Sixty-two years have passed since the end of the most gruesome battles history has bared witness to. On the day of victory, the entire world danced in the streets of the capital cities. Only the Jews did not join in these celebrations, there was no reason to celebrate - a third of their people were wiped out."

"Only on the day of Israel's independence did the Jews allow themselves to celebrate. In eight days we will be celebrating Israel's Independence Day. The correlation between this Remembrance Day, and the following celebrations is direct," Olmert continued.

So that’s what Israel Independence Day will be about next week.

Does that mean that Jews are out of the woods?

Bad news.

According to Tel Aviv University’s Stephen Roth Institute for the Study of Contemporary Anti-Semitism and Racism, anti-Semitic incidents world-wide increased 31% in 2006 from 2005. In France and Norway chief rabbis are calling on Jews not to step outside as Jews. They’re not to wear Jewish symbols.

This comes as no surprise to those of us who are outraged by threats of Holocaust denier Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to eliminate Israel.

So I read all of that this morning and took notes for you as I sipped my coffee and waited for my battery to go dead.

And I thought of a story that the daughter of a Holocaust survivor sent me. We had been corresponding and at one point I had been ruminating about the loss of my brother who drowned while away at college, whose body, born in 1950, passed on in 1970. He probably had a victim's soul in it, a soul that only needed to accomplish something that would take 20 years to accomplish.

I shared with her that sometimes I let my imagination go and when there are regrets-- it can really get out of control.

My new friend learned that I wish my parents had sent my brother to Israel to study in a seminary after high school, like modern Orthodox Jews try to do these days. Then he wouldn’t have been where he was and it wouldn’t have happened, he wouldn't have drowned at college.

She wrote me the following:

My mom tells a terrible story of her cousin who was locked up in a barracks in the final days of WWII in Auschwitz. This cousin heard that her barracks were set to be killed off. She smuggled her way out and snuck into a barrack nearby. The next day, prisoners in the new barracks were taken out and killed, my mom's cousin included. Most of the people in the original barracks survived.

Point of story? You can try to save yourself or be someplace else, but what will be will be. This story haunts my mom even now, more than 60 years later. She wishes her cousin had been someplace else, too.

Packs a punch.

What will be will be? Maybe for most things, maybe.

But we have to do what we can to be sure that atrocities like the Holocaust never happen again. What that means to each and every one of you, I don’t know. What it means to me is that I have to tell people that the Holocaust really did happen, despite what the idiot despots out there will have you believe. I know, I'm preaching to the choir.

Good morning friends. Have a good day. Stop and remember.

Copyright 2007, TherapyDoc