The Woman Who Walked Into the Ghetto

In 1942, Irena Sendler was a social worker in Warsaw with a permit to enter the Jewish Ghetto to inspect for typhus. She could have completed her rounds and gone home each evening to her warm apartment on the Aryan side of the wall. No one would have blamed her. Those children were not her children.

But Irena began smuggling babies out in toolboxes, suitcases, and ambulances. She sedated infants so they wouldn't cry at checkpoints. She hid toddlers under piles of rags in the backs of trucks. She recorded every child's real name on tissue paper and buried the slips in glass jars beneath an apple tree — so that one day, mothers might find their sons and daughters again.

The Gestapo eventually caught her. They shattered both her legs and both her feet. She never gave up a single name.

Irena had no guarantee of survival. She simply decided that some things matter more than safety. When Esther told Mordecai, "If I perish, I perish," she was not being reckless. She was being resolute. She counted the cost, gathered her people in fasting, and walked uninvited into the throne room of the most powerful man in the known world. Some moments demand that we stop calculating the odds and start obeying the call — even when the cost is everything we have.