Last week we (the tapeworm and I) wrote about Laurie Wood’s humble heroics just before D-day and how they were occasioned by his St. Helena High French teacher, Betsy Lull.

These days St. Helena Schools are being attacked from all sides—especially by the 5-year wonders. It may be simply a case that “no good deed goes unpunished.” Try to fix a broken system and folks will crucify you for it. Eliminate “dead weight”, raise the standards, upgrade offerings (Yes, there’s a difference between Home Ec and Culinary Arts), or raise the bar and those that can’t jump over it will come after you and paint you as the villain. It’s human nature. It’s implicit that if you improve an existing system, it’s axiomatic that something was wrong with the original one. Those that have a vested interest in perpetuating the old system will continually attack its replacement.

Criticize what you will; it’s hard to criticize Mr. Mazzi’s class on World War I. We are told that it is the only class of its kind in the U.S. A video has been done, the story of his kids interviewing Frank Buckles, (who at 108 years of age is the last surviving U.S. veteran of WWI) has made all the network shows and been printed in all the national papers. Mr. Mazzi and his kids deserve Kudos, as does everyone who backed his project, got the funds, and made it a reality. Visit his website at: http://ww1institute.org/

It turns out that Mr. Mazzi wasn’t the first magnificent teacher to come up with a brilliant idea. Apparently, in 1999, Norman Conrad a teacher in Uniontown, Kansas wanted his kids to do a project based on the quote, “He who changes one person, changes the entire world.”

He says that his kids “came across an old magazine article about a woman named Irena Sendler who is credited with saving over 2,000 children from the Warsaw Ghetto. Sendler, a Catholic, went into the Ghetto and talked Jewish parents into giving her their children, telling them that otherwise, they would die. She smuggled them out and got them adopted into Polish homes.”

(As she has become a legend, info on the internet is sketchy and often inaccurate. The following is one man’s best attempt to decipher it all).

A Catholic, Sendler, was born in Warsaw in 1910. As early as 1939, when the Germans invaded Warsaw, Irena began helping Jews by offering them food and shelter. Irena became in charge of the Children's Division of Zegota (a Polish underground group to assist Jewish people).

Accounts of her heroism vary. Some say she was a plumbing/sewer specialist. Some say she was social worker, working for the Contagious Disease Department .

Originally it was reported that all her rescues were babies. And that she put their names in jars, buried in her garden—hence the play written by the Uniontown High Students: “The Glass Jar.”

Rumor had it that she had a truck and smuggled babies out in her “tool box” or burlap bags. It was said she trained dogs to bark when the German guards approached, so they couldn’t hear the kids squealing.

Others say there were five distinct methods of rescue--using an ambulance children were taken out hidden under the stretcher. If a child could pretend to be sick or was actually very ill, it could be legally removed using the ambulance. Some escaped through the old courthouse at the edge of the Ghetto. Many children were taken out using the sewer pipes or other secret underground passages. Some were smuggled out on a trolley, hidden in a sack, trunk, or suitcase. Recent researchers believe the number of babies saved was small in relation to the total number of children rescued. No matter. It was all heroic.

After the war she dug up the jars and did her best to reunite the children with their relatives(most parents died in Treblinka gas chambers).

In 1943=2 0Irena was captured and tortured. Her legs and feet were broken.

She was to be shot, but Zegota bribed her executioner and she was smuggled out alive.

Til war’s end, she lived, hidden, like the children she saved.

Thanks to the “Glass Jar” Project she received notoriety in the last years of her life. In 2007 she was nominated for the Nobel Prize. She was not selected.

Al Gore won, for a slide show on Global Warming. Irena Sendler died at
age 98 in 2008.

Mr. Conrad, Mr. Mazzi, Ms. Lull. What a difference one teacher makes.