Life In A Jar: Saving Lives In Nazi Germany

This morning, Nov. 6, from 10 a.m. to Noon, Congregation Or Shalom, 205 Old Grassy Hill Road, will be commemorating Kristallnacht by presenting an inspiring program called "Life in a Jar," The Irena Sendler Project.

Irena, a Catholic social worker in Poland, saved 2,500 children from the Warsaw Ghetto in 1942-43.

The guest speaker will be Norm Conard, teacher and project director. In the fall of 1999, Conard, a rural Kansas teacher, encouraged four students to work on a year-long National History Day project which would, among other things, extend the boundaries of the classroom to families in the community, contribute to history learning, teach respect and tolerance, and meet their classroom motto, "He who changes one person, changes the world entire." 

They found that Irena Sendler, as a non-Jewish social worker, had gone into the Warsaw Ghetto, talked Jewish parents and grandparents into giving her their children, rightly saying that all were going to die in the Ghetto or in death camps, taking the children past the Nazi guards or using one of the many means of escape from the Ghetto-the old courthouse for example- and then adopting them into the homes of Polish families or hiding them in convents and orphanages.

She made lists of the children's real names and put the lists in jars, then buried the jars in a garden, so that someday she could dig up the jars and find the children to tell them of their real identity.

The Nazis captured her and she was beaten severely, but the Polish underground bribed a guard to release her, and she entered into hiding.

This year is the tenth anniversary of the meeting between Irena Sendler and Norm Conard and his students. The project's offshoot, the Lowell Milken Center in Fort Scott, KS, near Uniontown, was created to inspire and mentor teachers and students to discover and celebrate other unsung heroes. Its goal is to foster in-depth education projects that further respect and understanding of all races, religions and creeds. Norman Conard, whose box of newspaper and magazine clippings provided his students with their first clue about Irena Sendler, is the Milken Center's director.

This is a free event and all are welcome. No reservations required.

Kristallnacht

On November 9–10, 1938, the Nazis staged vicious pogroms—state sanctioned, anti-Jewish riots—against the Jewish community of Germany. These came to be known as Kristallnacht (now commonly translated as “Night of Broken Glass”), a reference to the untold numbers of broken windows of synagogues, Jewish-owned stores, community centers, and homes plundered and destroyed during the pogroms. Encouraged by the Nazi regime, the rioters burned or destroyed 267 synagogues, vandalized or looted 7,500 Jewish businesses, and killed at least 91 Jewish people. They also damaged many Jewish cemeteries, hospitals, schools, and homes as police and fire brigades stood aside. Kristallnacht was a turning point in history. The pogroms marked an intensification of Nazi anti-Jewish policy that would culminate in the Holocaust—the systematic, state-sponsored murder of Jews.