The Ambulance on Złota Street

In the autumn of 1943, a Polish social worker named Irena Sendler climbed into the back of an ambulance on Złota Street in Warsaw, carrying a burlap sack that held a sedated toddler. It was one of hundreds of such trips she made through the checkpoints of the Warsaw Ghetto, where nearly half a million Jews had been sealed behind ten-foot walls by Nazi decree. Sendler, who held a special permit from Warsaw's health department to inspect the ghetto for typhus, used every deception she could devise. Infants were smuggled inside toolboxes and potato sacks. Older children were guided through the city's sewer tunnels. A trained dog in one ambulance was taught to bark at the checkpoint, covering the sound of crying babies beneath the floorboards.

By the time the Gestapo arrested her in October 1943, Sendler and her network in the underground organization Żegota had smuggled approximately 2,500 children to safety with Polish families and convents. The Gestapo broke both her legs and her feet. She refused to give a single name.

James 1:27 tells us that pure religion is this: to look after orphans in their distress. Notice the scripture does not say to pray for orphans from a comfortable distance. It says look after them — a phrase that implies proximity, risk, and cost. Irena Sendler understood what too many believers forget: compassion that never puts anything on the line is sentiment, not faith. The God who asks us to care for the vulnerable never promised it would be safe. He only promised it would be real.