The Authors of a Winning Play, about the Holocaust, visit Poland.

In May 2001 four teenage girls from Uniontown- a small rural town in Kansas USA, visited Poland in the company of their parents and their history teacher. They were the winners of a state history competition, organized for high school students by the state authorities. They won it by writing a play "The Life in the jar" about the heroic actions of a Polish woman Mrs. Irena Sendler during WWII.
Mrs Sendler was a member of "ZEGOTA" - an organization created by the Polish underground leadership and Polish Home Army, directed by the Polish government in exile, in London, U.K. This organization, unique in German occupied Europe, was set up to help the Jewish population of Poland to survive, because they were condemned to death by the Nazis who called it the "final solution of the Jewish question" -a German euphemism for their annihilation. As the head of ZEGOTA's section concerned with the welfare of children, Mrs. Sendler succeeded, with her collaborators, to smuggle, out of the Warsaw ghetto, 2500 Jewish children and to confide them to Polish Christian families. The children's real names, together with the new Polish ones given to them, essential to their survival, were duly recorded on small pieces of paper in order to render their future reunion with their families possible, after the war. In order to protect these documents from the German police, the cards were put in the small jars and buried by Mrs. Sendler in her garden. Hence the title given to their 10 minutes play, by the winning students from Kansas.
It is worth noting that the activities of Mrs. Sendler and of her team were punishable by death and had to be carried out at great risk. In spite of all the precautions Mrs. Sendler was arrested by Gestapo and submitted to a very brutal investigation. She betrayed no one and was saved, in extremis, by a huge bribe offered to, and accepted by, her tormentors. Such was the lady portrayed by the young American girls from Uniontown, Kansas who came to visit Poland.
In Warsaw they and their escorts were received by the USA ambassador to Poland Mr. Christopher Hill. They also visited Mrs. Sendler, the 90 year old heroine of their play and the reason for their trip . They had a long chat with her, carried on with the help of an interpreter for neither party could communicate with the other due to a language barrier. Their correspondence is also carried on, in the same way: letters from Poland are translated in USA into English, while American ones are subjected in Warsaw to the same treatment, but in the "opposite direction".
The students found Mrs. Sendler, in spite of her advanced age, very friendly and able to establish a very good contact with them. They were also very impressed by her modesty-she asked them to not call her a "heroine". She was not disappointed that her actions were not known to the world at large. She simply stated that she did what she thought she had to do. After the visit the young American girls said that they felt better about themselves than before their visit to Poland.
In 1956 Mrs. Janina Sendler received from the state of Israel the title of "Righteous Among The Nations" and in 1991 she became its honorary citizen.