Book Description The true tale of Irena Sendlerowa, a social worker in the Warsaw ghetto in the early 1940s, during the early days of German occupation. She is credited for saving the lives of 2500 Jewish children by gradually and quietly smuggling them to safety in small groups. While she is eventually arrested by Gestapo, imprisoned, and tortured for her actions, she refuses to reveal her network and is condemned to death. She is ultimately saved from death by other members of her organization. After the war, she retrieved the names of all children she saved (kept in a glass jar buried under a tree behind her house) and attempted to locate each of their parents for reunion. And while most of the parents had been gassed in the Holocaust, she made it her mission to help those orphans find new homes. Another true SCHINDLER’S LIST scenario, illustrated for a younger audience, but equally moving for adults. Customers Review: Remembering history is so vitally important and this book is an excellent way of introducing kids to a very bad time in human history. Especially since so much of it is being repeated in our times. What this woman and her friends accomplished and endured must never be forgotten. I’m anxiously awaiting the sequel, since this is only the first book.
** Trigger warning for anti-Semitic violence. **Irena Sendlerowa (maiden name Krzyżanowska) was born on February 10, 1910 in Warsaw, Poland. Shew grew up in nearby Otwock, which was home to a large Jewish community. Her father Stanisław was a physician who treated everyone, regardless of their ethnicity or ability to pay. He contracted typhus in the line of duty, and died when Irena was just seven. Despite being raised by a single mother, Irena attended college, studying law and literature at the University of Warsaw. She was a socialist who was outspoken in support of her Jewish classmates. Identified as a leftist, she was denied employment in the Warsaw school system.Instead, Irena was working for the Social Welfare Department when Germany invaded Poland. Here she was uniquely positioned to provide help to Poland’s most marginalized citizens. Irena’s department was allowed access to the Warsaw Ghetto, ostensibly to conduct sanitary inspections and help prevent the outbreak and spread of epidemics. Here she leveraged her position to make life a little more bearable for the ghetto’s 4,000 Jewish residents, by smuggling in food, clothing, and medicine – with the help of a large and ever-expanding group of family, friends, and colleagues, of course.Irena also began smuggling out people, including dozens of children and babies, which she placed in a network of foster homes, orphanages, and religious sanctuaries. She diligently recorded the given name, fake name, and new address of each child, so that they could be reunited with their families after the war was over. In order to avoid incriminating herself in the event of a search – and making it easier for the Gestapo to find the missing children – Irena placed the names in jars, which she buried. Sadly, while her records survived the war, most of their would-be recipients did not. A majority of the children Irena and her network rescued – up to 2,500, by some estimates – were orphaned.Perhaps the most astonishing part of Irena’s story is that she was captured, interrogated, and sentenced to death in 1943. Despite repeated torture, she did not name her co-conspirators or the people they rescued. She escaped when the Żegota, a Polish resistance organization with which she’d been working, bribed a German guard. Instead of giving up or fleeing the country, Irena resumed her subversive activities, albeit under an assumed name and new occupation: Klara Dąbrowska, nurse. Irena died of natural causes in 2008; she was 98 years old.IRENA, BOOK ONE: WARTIME GHETTO covers the events through Irena’s capture by and escape from the Gestapo. To describe it as “powerful” is a gross understatement. It’s a force, though not quite like Irena. I imagine very few things could come that close. (Later in life, Irena rarely gave interviews, and vehemently insisted that she hated the word “hero” and did not consider herself one. If she wasn’t, then they simply don’t exist.)While rooted firmly in fact, the narrative does contain some fictional and downright fantastical elements. For example, Morvan identifies the murder of a young boy by a sadistic SS officer as the impetus for Irena’s human smuggling; yet Wiki says that she began her operations when some friends were trapped on the Jewish side of the wall.Still, some of the more surreal embellishments, like the ghosts (of Nethanial and the other murdered Jews, as well as Irena’s father, always guiding her towards what’s right) and Nethanial’s loyal and prescient dog, are inspired and will bring you to tears.IRENA’S CHILDREN just moved higher on my TBR list; and, imho, a desire to learn more is usually a pretty good indicator of a comic book or tv show’s success.The artwork has a Dickensian quality to it. It wasn’t my favorite at first, but it grew on me. It suits the mood and content of the story perfectly.As I write this review, supporters of Drumpf’s border policy – which includes ramped up ICE raids across the country this weekend – are splitting hairs over terminology, questioning whether the “dog pounds” along the border qualify as “concentration camps.” I am reminded of that older woman who showed up to a rally for women’s rights bearing a sign that proclaims “I can’t believe I still have to protest this f***ing s***.” I wonder what Irena would do if she lived in Texas or New York or Minnesota in June of 2019.
Part one of a graphic novel biography of Irena Sendlerowa, a Polish social worker who smuggled out hundreds of children from the Warsaw ghetto. This book covers how Irena started smuggling children out up until her arrest by the Gestapo.A moving story of a brave woman who saved hundreds of lives in WWII. This graphic novel really brings Irena to life. It does a good job of giving readers a sense of the gravity of the situations without tons of gory details. The art style is also friendly to middle grade readers. It’s engaging and also informative. This would be a great addition to any WWII units, and highly recommended to anyone looking for biographies of people who have made a big impact in the world for good. I’m looking forward to the next volume. (I was glad that a synopsis of Irena’s biography is included in the back of the book to clarify that she doesn’t die at the end of this one and there’s more of her story to come.)Notes on content: No language issues. No sexual content. There are deaths that happen and Irena is tortured for information, but everything is done in ways that suggest violence without actually showing any violence on page. I’d have no qualms handing this to middle grade readers.
‘Irena Book One: Wartime Ghetto’ by Jean-David Morvan and Severine Trefouel with art by David Evrard is story based on truth about Irena Sedlerowa, a social worker in the Warsaw Ghetto in the early 1940s.Irena Sendlerowa was a social worker in one of the worst possible places. She tried to battle disease and hunger. When a dying mother gives Irena her son, Irena is not sure what to do. When the child dies, she knows she must do something. She joins a network of people dedicated to smuggling children out of the Warsaw Ghetto. They use ingenious methods, like giving the children doses of alcohol to keep them quiet and smuggling them out in trucks full of bricks. Irena gives them new names, but keeps track of their old ones to give back to them some day. Because of her actions, she was imprisoned and tortured, but managed to save around 2500 Jewish children.I really liked this story of someone who decides they can’t just sit by, and how that ripples into the kind of numbers that were achieved. The art is really good too, but it’s a bit cartoonish looking. It makes it a bit odd to see this character being tortured pretty brutally, but I like the art and the color scheme used.I received a review copy of this graphic novel from Lion Forge, Diamond Book Distributors, and NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. Thank you for allowing me to review this graphic novel.
Irena is the story of a Polish social worker in the Warsaw Ghetto during World War II. After seeing the abhorrent conditions the Jews were living in, she creates a network to smuggle children out, ultimately saving over 2,500 children. The book is full of tension filled scenes as the children are smuggled across Nazi checkpoints in various ways. The Peanuts style artwork was a bit odd at first but it worked as a sharp contrast to some of the brutal scenes portrayed. All in all, this was very good. |
6 reviews