Life in a Jar: The Irena Sendler Project
Based on the True Story of Irena Sendler — a Holocaust Hero — and the Kansas Teens Who “Rescued the Rescuer”
LIFE IN A JAR on Amazon (NOT an affiliate link).
Jack Mayer, M.D., author of LIFE IN A JAR: THE IRENA SENDLER PROJECT, in 2017 wrote the backstory (below) of the book, which he describes in his author’s note as a “work of creative nonfiction.” (Note that the real-life hero Irena Sendler is one of the roles in the nonfiction play THIN EDGE OF THE WEDGE.)
How does a Vermont pediatrician come to write this book?
I am a German Jew, born in the U.S. after WWII to parents who narrowly escaped the Holocaust. Others in my family did not. For the first five years of my life I lived in upper Manhattan in Washington Heights – an urban “shtetl” of German Jews who had survived the Holocaust. I didn’t speak English until I was five years old. The Holocaust was the baffling, but iconic story of my childhood – a subject of nervous, hushed, adult conversation.
For me the Holocaust was frightening, mysterious, impossible to grasp, yet everywhere – it was the atmosphere. There was an awkward gracelessness on the part of those who lived through it, a furtiveness I now understand to be a kind of PTSD – denial, shame, hypersensitivity, flashbacks, depression. It was the unacknowledged elephant in the living room – huge, but shrouded.
How did this dreadful silence manifest in my life? It wasn’t until I was in my 20s that I first learned about some of my family’s Holocaust history:
My father, Heinz, had emigrated from Germany to Palestine in 1936, then immigrated to England in 1937, and New York City in 1938.
May-June 1938: My mother, Nanni, graduated from nursing school in Frankfurt and emigrated from Mainz with her mother and father to America on the USS Manhattan. This was two months after the Anschluss (annexation of Austria) and they barely made it on board in time, but without any of their luggage.
My grandfather Paul Mayer (Heinz’ father) was arrested on Kristallnacht in Munich in November 1938 and was in prison in Dachau for a month. My grandmother was able to get him out because she went to high school with one of the administrative Dachau guards and he accepted her bribe. They fled Germany less than two months later in January 1939 and crossed over illegally into Switzerland.
The Swiss had closed the border to Jews and had asked the Nazi government to stamp each Jew’s passport with a large red “J”. Some Swiss border guards (notably Paul Greuninger) allowed Jews to enter illegally, falsely stamping their passports with a date preceding the border closing and employing other tactics. I believe my Omi and Opi survived because of Greuninger’s conscience and courage, though I’ll never know.
My parents met in New York City, when my mother was a nurse for my father’s grandfather. My father went on to serve in WWII as a translator for George W. Ball and the Strategic Bombing Survey and, after the war, helping with displaced persons in Europe.
In 1999 my parents were interviewed as part of Steven Spielberg’s Shoah project. In the course of the interview my mother brought out her identity papers marked “Jew” and her nursing certificate stamped with a swastika. My brother and I had never seen these artifacts.
I always had a sense of “mission” about the Holocaust, but didn’t know how that would manifest in my life.
One day in 2001 I received a calendar from the U.S. Holocaust Memorial and Museum. In it I saw the very brief reference to Irena Sendler and that she had rescued 2,500 Jewish children from certain death in the Warsaw ghetto. I was surprised not to know this story. Everyone know Oskar Schindler who rescued 1,100 Jews from a German concentration camp in Poland. Why didn’t I know her?
I put the calendar in a folder I have in my desk labelled “Interesting Stuff” and there it sat for three years. One February night in 2004 I went into my office to see a sick child and found on my desk a copy of the Ladies Home Journal opened to an article “The Woman Who Loved Children” about Irena Sendler and the Kansas teens who had uncovered her forgotten story.
I called the teacher in Kansas — Mr. C — Norm Conard and we talked. He was looking for an author to write both stories — Irena’s wartime story and the contemporary story of the Kansas teens and Irena.
I went out to visit and interview them in November 2004 and I fell in love with the story, with the kids, with Irena. My wife and I accompanied the students and Mr. C to Poland on their third visit with Irena in 2005, where I was able to do a lot of research and interview scholars and people Irena rescued.
I am especially compelled by rescuers. During WWII Poland was the most victimized country in occupied Europe. The calculus of rescue in Poland was more severe than in any other country. Hiding or even feeding a Jew was punishable by your death and the death of your family. Yet Yad Vashem has recognized more Righteous Gentiles from Poland than any other country in occupied Europe. In 2015 – 25,685 Righteous Gentiles. From Poland – 6,532 (25%).
When I travelled to Poland with Norm and the students in 2005, I had a large group of scholars, rescuers, and survivors to interview. They were so eager to talk and tell their stories, at least partly because the Life in a Jar/Irena Sendler Project had cracked open Polish/Jewish dialogue in Poland as well as scholarship and dialogue about Poland during the Holocaust.
When I returned in 2013, for the release of the Polish translation, I saw how much had changed in Poland as a result of the Life in a Jar/Irena Sendler Project. It was so gratifying.
As for the Kansas teens who started this amazing project, Liz now has two Masters degrees (Education and History) and teaches Holocaust history in Missouri. She has one child. Megan is the program coordinator for the Irena Sendler/Life in a Jar Foundation, still working with Mr. C (Norm Conard) to further Irena’s legacy. Sabrina has three children and is an elementary school teacher in Kansas.
I hope you all pass this story on to someone else. That is how this book has become popular — person to person. It’s very gratifying.
LIFE IN A JAR on Amazon (NOT an affiliate link).