From the New York Times bestselling author of The Widow Clicquot comes an extraordinary and gripping true account of Irena Sendler—the “female Oskar Schindler”—who 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. She started smuggling children out of the walled district, convincing her friends and neighbors to hide them. 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.
In Irena’s Children, Tilar Mazzeo shares the incredible story of this courageous and brave woman who risked her life to save innocent children from the Holocaust—a truly heroic tale of survival, resilience, and redemption.
Tilar J. Mazzeo
Tilar J. Mazzeo is the New York Times and San
Francisco Chronicle bestselling author of books that include The Widow
Clicquot, The Secret of Chanel No. 5, and Hotel on the Place
Vendôme (all from HarperCollins). She also writes on food and wine
for the mainstream press. Her work has appeared in venues such as Food
& Wine and in her Back-Lane Wineries guidebook series (Ten Speed
Press). Her course on creative nonfiction (Great Courses), is widely distributed and has made
her a nationally prominent teacher of writing in nonfiction genres. The Clara C.
Piper Associate Professor of English at Colby College, she divides her time among coastal Maine, New York City, and
Saanichton, British Columbia, where she lives with her
husband and stepchildren.
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