In the fall of 1999, three grade nine students and one grade eleven student in Uniontown, Kansas, decided to work on a year-long National History Day project for a contest. They chose to write and perform a one-act play about the Holocaust, focusing on the work of Polish social worker Irena Sendlerowa.   Irena offered food and shelter to Jews, forged over three thousand false documents to help them escape, and smuggled more than 2,500 children from the Warsaw Ghetto in 1942-43, until she was arrested. She was tortured, sentenced to die, and rescued by Underground workers. She disappeared into obscurity after her execution was announced.

The students were unable to unearth much information about her until they received an e-mail telling them that Irena (born in 1910) was still alive. They contacted her and started a correspondence, getting first-hand facts about her story. Their project did not win the contest, but it raised public awareness of Irena Sendler. The play, “Life in a Jar” has been performed hundreds of times. The students were able to travel to Poland to visit Irena.  They followed up with an ongoing correspondence, and are involved in raising funds to support Irena and other rescue workers. The Life In a Jar project is still alive and well.  Irena was nominated for the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize.

One of the students, Megan Stewart Felt, changed her career path because of this experience. She is a program director of the Lowell Milken Center, which encourages and facilitates educational projects in schools. According to the mission statement,
“The purpose of the Lowell Milken Center is to galvanize a movement for teaching respect and understanding among all people regardless of race, religion or creed. The Center promotes this mission throughout America and around the world through educational projects that feature unsung heroes as role models to repair the world.'”

Irena Sendlerowa is the proverbial little old lady, not even five feet tall, with beautiful white hair. She insists that she is no hero. “I did what anyone would have done.”

What anyone would have done? No. What Irena did was not normative behavior. If we want to repair the world, we will have to make it normative behavior. Instead of idolizing the rich, the glamorous and the flamboyantly criminal, we need to keep our eyes on the righteous warriors who simply cannot help doing something about the evil in the world around them.