The Names in the Jar

In the autumn of 1943, a slim Polish social worker named Irena Sendler walked through the gates of the Warsaw Ghetto carrying a carpenter's toolbox. Inside it, beneath a layer of rags, lay a sedated infant. Outside, an ambulance driver named Antoni waited, his dog trained to bark loudly enough to cover any cry from the child. This was one of roughly 2,500 times Sendler and her network within Żegota — the Polish Council to Aid Jews — smuggled Jewish children past Nazi guards using toolboxes, suitcases, sewer pipes, and ambulances.

Each night, Sendler recorded every child's real name on thin tissue paper and sealed the slips inside glass jars, burying them beneath an apple tree in her colleague's yard on Lekarska Street. She was determined that these children would one day know who they were. In October 1943, the Gestapo arrested her. They broke both her legs and feet. She never spoke a single name.

Jesus said, "Whoever welcomes one such child in my name welcomes me" (Matthew 18:5). Sendler welcomed 2,500. She could not have known, as she tucked that infant into the toolbox, that she was enacting the very heart of the Gospel — that every small life carried across a checkpoint was an encounter with the Holy One Himself.

Courage is not the absence of trembling hands. It is picking up the toolbox anyway, because a child's life outweighs your own.