Life in a Jar: The Irena Sendler Project

The first cases of typhus begin to appear in January and increase “week to week, almost exclusively in the Jewish district, where most of Irena’s clients [live]” (104). Irena and her mother search her clothes every day and crush any lice they find. Irena becomes worried that her mother will contract the same disease that killed her father, who himself “contracted [it]from treating sick and impoverished Jews” (104).

The winter brings “historic cold” (104) to Warsaw. Janina suffers a chest infection but isn’t able to find a doctor to treat her for days; the doctor who does tells Irena he has “not seen so much illness since the 1918 Spanish Flu pandemic” (104). As the doctor treats her mother, she recalls her father’s treatment. She was only 7 at the time and was told they would be spending time with relatives. When she tried to kiss her father goodbye, she was sharply rebuked. As his last words to her, he told her to “[a]lways remember […] If you see someone drowning, you must rescue him, even if you cannot swim” (105).

Germany issues new decrees “almost daily—a new restriction, another indignity, a slow tightening of the occupation vice” (106). Streets and transport become operable again; most pedestrians, on the other hand, are Jewish, who dress poorly and plainly in order to avoid “[a]ny evidence of opulence” (106), which might result in the Germans seizing their things.