‘Jar’ story still resonates

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May 17, 2013 - 12:00 AM

Megan (Stewart) Felt told Iola Rotarians Thursday how Irena Sendler saved 2,500 Jewish children from almost certain death during World War II.
Felt and three other Uniontown High School students, starting in 1999, developed a National History Day project that focused on Sendler’s role to undermine Nazi intentions of exterminating Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto.
The play “Life in a Jar” — later a book and Hallmark Channel movie — evolved from the students’ project to tell Sendler’s story. “Jar” became an integral part of the title because Sendler jotted down the names of children saved, placed the names in a jar and buried the jars near an apple tree, “not far from a German barracks.”
Felt was a freshman when she and the others picked the Holocaust — the Nazi murders of Jews and other “undesirables” — for a year-long project.
Norm Conard, now director of the Lowell Milken Center in Fort Scott and then a UHS history teacher, showed them a folder of clippings. One — from a 1994 issue of U.S. News and World Report — mentioned Sender’s role in saving Jewish children.
“We found just one site on Google that mentioned Sendler,” Felt said, and thought an estimate of 2,500 children saved probably was in error, that it more likely was 250. “We started looking for her burial site, but then found she was still alive.”
That prompted them to write a letter to Sendler, explaining what they wanted to do.
“One day one of the girls came running down the only hall in Uniontown High, yelling that we had gotten a response,” Felt said.
To their exasperation the letter was written in Polish.
“We found a translator at KU. The first thing the letter said was, ‘To my dear and beloved girls,’” Felt recalled.
Sendler’s letter also was packed with information, including that she had much help in saving the Jewish children. Of the collaborators, 24 were women and one a man. Sendler said she asked herself each day, during her covert efforts to help the children, whether “I did enough, could I have done more.”
As it was, Sendler spent every day looking for children to save. Sometimes it took convincing parents or grandparents of the true danger their children faced.
Sendler noted she wasn’t always successful.
“Sometimes by the next day the child would have been deported,” she wrote.
Many of the children were extracted from the ghetto through a church, with young boys — who might have been eligible for forced labor — sometimes dressed as girls and other children’s hair dyed blond to disguise their ethnicity.
Once out of the ghetto, Sendler and her collaborators hid the children for the duration of the war.

THE GIRLS put the project together and performed it as living history, including at a large high school in Kansas City, all the while wishing they could find a way to travel to Poland to meet Sendler and hear her story first-hand.
After the Kansas City performance, “We went to the China Star, at 95th and McCall, to eat lunch,” Felt said. While there a businessman of Jewish descent, who had seen the performance, learned of their desire to travel to Warsaw to meet their heroine.
“Within 24 hours we had the money to go,” Felt said.
The experience was moving. “When we walked into Irena’s apartment, we hugged her and told her she was our hero,” Felt said. Sendler’s modest response was that she wasn’t a hero, that she “just did what anyone else would have done.”
Sendler also told the girls she acted on advice she received from her father when on his deathbed: “If you see someone drowning in a river, you have to jump in and save them.”
That, figuratively, is what she did: She saw children dying at the hands of the Nazis and saved as many as she could.
In 2005, Felt and others took the “Life in a Jar” play to Poland and visited Sendler on her 95th birthday. Felt’s brother, then a freshman at UHS, played the part of a Nazi soldier.
“When Irena hugged him she said something in Polish that caused everyone in the room — photographers and film crews — to laugh out loud.
“Later we found out she said, ‘I never thought I’d hug a Nazi.’”
Sendler died May 12, 2008, at 98.

THROUGH THE Milken Center, where Felt is program director, “Life in a Jar” continues to be performed in Kansas and elsewhere.
“We had our 315th performance in April and will do one in Mound City in November,” Felt said.
“We teach how to create projects at the Milken Center,” Felt said. “We have 50 pages of unsung heroes whose stories are waiting to be told.”
The center has coordinated projects in 50 states and 27 countries and has had visitors from 47 states and 50 countries. This summer 10 teachers are attending extended seminars at the center.

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