Irena Sendler: In the Name of Their Mothers
At 95, Irena Sendler reveals how she and a group of young Polish women risked their lives to save thousands of Jewish children from the Warsaw ghetto. Sendler was captured by the Gestapo, tortured and sentenced to death in 1943 but she refused to divulge anything about her underground operation. She escaped miraculously on the day she was to be executed. The 2,500 Jewish children she and her liaisons had hidden all survived the war, and many were later re-united with their Jewish families. But for decades in Communist Poland, neither the children nor their wartime caretakers could speak about their experiences. This film features the last long interviews Sendler gave before she died in 2008, along with several of her liaisons in the Polish Resistance and the now-grown children they saved.