Reliving history
By Brandy Nance
Originally published 01:56 p.m., February 1, 2008
Updated 01:56 p.m., February 1, 2008
Tikkun Olam.
The words mean “repair the world” and it’s the motto of a group of people who are telling the story of how a non-Jewish Polish woman saved more than 2,000 children in the 1940s. Area residents will have a chance next week to see what it’s all about.
What started out as a National History Day project in 1999 for four Uniontown high school students is now a national and international play and mission featuring a Polish Catholic woman who saved Jewish children. “Life in a Jar,” which portrays the efforts of a Polish Catholic woman, Irena Sendlerowa, will be performed at 7 p.m. Monday at Southern Coffey County Middle School.
The play focuses on Sendler, a non-Jewish social worker who went into the Warsaw Ghetto and talked to Jewish parents and grandparents and convinced them to allow their children to be placed into the homes of Polish families or hidden in convents or orphanages.
The ninth-graders, Megan Stewart, Elizabeth Chambers and Jessica Shelton and 11th-grader Sabrina Coons were students of Norm Conard. They needed to do a project for National History Day in 1999. Conard showed the students a clipping from a March 1994 issue of News and World Report. The report stated that Sendler had saved 2,500 children from that ghetto in 1942-43.
The students researched Sendler and found that she helped smuggle the Jewish children past the Nazi guards in body bags or using one or another means to remove them, thus saving them from death camps. Sendler made lists of the children’s real names and put the lists into jars and buried the jars in a garden with the hopes of digging them up later to find the children and tell them their real identity. This was not possible in many cases because the parents were later killed.
After their research, the students wrote a performance, “Life in a Jar,” which has been performed more than 225 times both nationally and internationally. They began performing for clubs, religious organizations and civic groups in the community and around the state. This grew to nationwide and has since gone international.
Later, the students’ hometown sponsored an Irena Sendler Day. The students then looked for the final resting place of Sendler and found her living in Warsaw, Poland.
Sendler will be 98 on Feb. 15, Conard said.
The students have had the opportunity to meet her, and she gave the students heart pendants, telling them they will always have a piece of her heart with them, said Megan (Stewart) Felt, who still performs in “Life in a Jar.”
“I still have the necklace and I wear it often,” Felt said.
Felt said she and the other three students had no idea “Life in a Jar” would be so far-reaching.
“We just thought it was going to be a little play that we did our freshman year,” Felt said. “We knew her story had touched us and our lives, but we didn’t know it would touch so many other people.”
At each performance, a jar is used to collect funds for Sendler and other Polish rescuers. Today, some of the original students still perform in the play.
“I don’t think we even realized or visualized that the story could have this kind of impact in a small way, let alone be such a national and international story with this kind of impact,” Conard said.
Jamie Walker, of Pittsburg plays three roles in the play. She said the play changed her life. She had become a person she didn’t recognize in college — someone who didn’t want to get out and do things. When she met Felt and got involved in the play, that all changed.
“Immediately I noticed a change in myself,” Walker said. “Irena did so much with so little. Why concentrate on the problems in my life? They were minuscule in comparison.”
Felt plays Sendler in the play. She said it can be a challenge playing her as she doesn’t know how Sendler truly would have felt or reacted.
“It’s different every time,” Felt said. “I don’t think I play the role the same twice.”
Through this project, another project unfolded. The Lowell Milken Center for Teaching Respect and Understanding in Fort Scott was founded. The foundation got a grant from the Lowell Milken Foundation out of California. The goal of the organization is to develop a program to help teachers and students to create projects like “Life in a Jar.” Each program is designed to “change the world.”
On the Net:
Life in a Jar: www.irenasendler.org.