The Librarian Who Opened the Door

In 1943, Irena Sendler worked as a nurse in the Warsaw Public Health Department. The Nazis had sealed 400,000 Jewish families behind the ghetto walls, and typhus gave Irena a reason to walk through the gates — health inspectors were permitted entry. She could have simply done her job, filed her reports, and gone home each evening to her apartment on Ludwiki Street. No one would have blamed her. The risk of helping was execution.

But Irena recognized something Mordecai understood centuries earlier — that her position was not accidental. She had access. She had credentials. She had a truck with a false compartment in the floor. So she began smuggling children out, one at a time, sometimes sedated in toolboxes, sometimes hidden under piles of rags. She recorded each child's real name in glass jars buried beneath an apple tree, believing that one day families might be reunited.

By war's end, Irena Sendler had rescued approximately 2,500 children.

Mordecai's words to Esther cut through every comfortable excuse: "Who knows but that you have come to your royal position for such a time as this?" Providence does not place us in positions of influence so we can protect ourselves. Every open door, every credential, every seat at a table we did not build — these are invitations from the Almighty to spend our safety on behalf of someone else's survival.