Life in a Jar: The Irena Sendler Project

Life in a Jar: The Irena Sendler Project is a work of creative nonfiction written by Jack Mayer and originally published in 2010. The book tells two overlapping stories. One is about Irena Sendler, a Polish social worker who helped save 2,500 Jewish children in Warsaw from the Nazis during World War II. The other is about three high school girls—Liz Cambers, Megan Stewart, and Sabrina Coons. In 1999, the girls, with the help of their history teacher, rediscover Irena’s heroism and tell her story to the world through a National History Day project. Although based on true events, the work is considered to be creative nonfiction because the author used the real-life elements as a base in order to create a story (e.g., the dialogue and many of the details are inventions); as a result, the book is developed more like a novel than a work of history.

Part 1 takes place in Kansas, beginning in 1999. Liz Cambers, known as a troublemaker, has just begun a new school year; in order to avoid taking another class with a teacher she dislikes, she requests to join Mr.