“Did I do enough?” – Irena Sendler
On October 20, 1943, the Gestapo came to Irena Sendler’s apartment and took her to a jail. There they interrogated and brutally tortured her for the names of Zegota leaders, which she refused to give up. She received a sentence of death by firing squad and stayed for weeks in prison with her legs and feet fractured from the beatings. The night before she was to be executed, a German guard, whom Zegota had bribed, helped her escape. The next day, posters went up all over the city with news that Irena had been shot. She read these posters herself. When the war was finally over, she dug up the jars and began the difficult job of finding the children and locating living relatives. Tragically, most family members had perished at Treblinka.
For the remainder of her life, she was haunted by the horrors she had witnessed, asking herself every day, “Did I do enough?”