Thank you to Robyn for hosting last Tuesday night and thank you to Kimberly for the amazing snowman macarons!
We'll skip December and meet next on January 9 (second Thursday in the month). The book is Irena's Children:? A True Story of Courage by Tilar J. Mazzeo. The book is available on Amazon, including used copies for around $6, and at the Orem Library (including two on Libby).
Irena's Children: A True Story of Courage?
by
?
From the New York Times bestselling author of The Widow Clicquot
comes an extraordinary and gripping account of Irena Sendler¡ªthe
¡°female Oskar Schindler¡±¡ªwho took staggering risks to save 2,500
children from death and deportation in Nazi-occupied Poland during World
War II.
In 1942, one young social worker, Irena
Sendler, was granted access to the Warsaw ghetto as a public health
specialist. While she was there, she began to understand the fate that
awaited the Jewish families who were unable to leave. Soon she reached
out to the trapped families, going from door to door and asking them to
trust her with their young children. Driven to extreme measures and with
the help of a network of local tradesmen, ghetto residents, and her
star-crossed lover in the Jewish resistance, Irena ultimately smuggled
thousands of children past the Nazis. She made dangerous trips through
the city¡¯s sewers, hid children in coffins, snuck them under overcoats
at checkpoints, and slipped them through secret passages in abandoned
buildings.
But Irena did something even more astonishing at
immense personal risk: she kept a secret list buried in bottles under an
old apple tree in a friend¡¯s back garden. On it were the names and true
identities of these Jewish children, recorded so their families could
find them after the war. She could not know that more than ninety
percent of their families would perish.
Irena¡¯s Children,
¡°a fascinating narrative of¡the extraordinary moral and physical
courage of those who chose to fight inhumanity with compassion¡± (Chaya
Deitsch author of Here and There: Leaving Hasidism, Keeping My Family), is a truly heroic tale of survival, resilience, and redemption.
