Irena Sendler is my hero. She saw injustice and she saved thousands without regards to her own safety.

To read more:doncarina.com/irena-sendler.html

Irena Sendler told me this story in 2004: One day in late 1943, while a prisoner in Pawiak Prison, after many beatings by the Gestapo, Irena Sendler was on the verge of losing hope. As she lay down exhausted in the cell where she was held, she felt a Holy Card of the Divine Mercy image under the straw mattress in the cell. At that moment she knew, the Polish Resistance was trying to get her out. Within a few days she was walked out of the prison with a group of other women who were to be executed; the German guard who escorted them told her to run in the other direction. She escaped with nothing but that Holy Card and she held on to it for the rest of the war. When Pope John Paul II, the Polish Pope, came to Poland again for the first time, she stood in line to see him and she gave him that card, saying "this card was all I had after I escaped from Pawiak Prison and it carried me through to the end of the war." Then in 2004, when she was recognized by the Pope for her wartime work, he returned the same card to her in the letter he wrote to her, to commend her at the end of her life.

thedivinemercy.org/message

To learn more about Irena Sendler and the upcoming broadcast on PBS...

pressroom.pbs.org/…/IRENA-SENDLER-I…