By John Mulderig
Catholic News Service

NEW YORK (CNS) — During the Nazi occupation of Poland that began in 1939, Polish social worker Irena Sendler used her government-sponsored access to Warsaw’s Jewish ghetto to smuggle some of the children trapped there to safety, placing them in Catholic homes and Church-run institutions, but keeping records of their original families in the hope of facilitating postwar reunions.

Sendler is pictured on March 14, 2007, the year before she died at age 98. CNS photo/Katarina Stoltz, Reut ers

Ultimately, Sendler saved 2,500 boys and girls who would otherwise have perished in concentration camps or in the 1943 destruction of the ghetto.

Her exploits earned her the nickname the “Female Schindler,” after German businessman Oskar Schindler, whose successful scheme to save Jews by employing them as factory workers was celebrated in Steven Spielberg’s 1993 drama, “Schindler’s List.”

“The Courageous Heart of Irena Sendler,” a finely crafted “Hallmark Hall of Fame” drama based on Sendler’s wartime adventures, airs on CBS Sunday, April 19. Adapted from Anna Mieszkowska’s book, “The Mother of the Holocaust Children,” by co-writer (with Lawrence John Spagnola) and director John Kent Harrison, the film stars Anna Paquin in the title role.

Paquin portrays Sendler as an ordinary, level-headed woman remarkable only for her moral clarity and the mix of determination and ingenuity with which she carries out her self-selected mission.

The religious, and specifically Catholic, origins of that mission are suggested by everything from the large icon of Our Lady of Czestochowa that hangs over the bed of Irena’s sickly mother, Janina (Marcia Gay Harden), to the fact that Irena’s first collaborator is a local parish priest, Msgr. Godlewski (Paul Freeman). The extensive cooperation between the Polish Church and the resistance movement also is highlighted.

While young viewers would obviously profit from this thoughtful portrait of an exemplary good Samaritan, and from the accurate re-creation of a harrowing chapter in recent history, scenes in which Jewish parents and children are forced to part are inevitably wrenching, and realistic scenes of Gestapo torture may prove disturbing.

(Mulderig is on the staff of the Office for Film & Broadcasting of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops. More reviews are available online at www.usccb.org/movies.)

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