One Thing. Then Another. Then Another.
There is an event on my calendar that I never delete. No matter how many computers, phones, and operating systems I've changed, it always comes with me. It’s not a birthday, or a holiday, or a personal milestone. It’s the anniversary of a death.
The death of someone I never met.
Her name was Irena Sendler, and she passed away seventeen years ago, yesterday. Just two years short of her hundredth birthday. I don’t remember how I first learned about her, or when I decided to keep the date. But every year, when it appears, I pause.
In 1939, she was twenty-nine years old and working as a social worker in Warsaw. Her job was straightforward: she delivered food, checked sanitation, reviewed permits. She carried a clipboard and a badge. It wasn’t glamorous work. It barely drew attention. But the badge gave her access to places other people couldn’t go, and eventually, that access became the most important thing she had.
When the Nazis sealed the Warsaw Ghetto, trapping hundreds of thousands of Jews inside, conditions deteriorated rapidly. Food was almost gone, disease spread uncontrollably, and death became an everyday fact. Most people didn’t know how to respond, and most did nothing. But Irena, with her badge and her quiet determination, went in.
At first, she brought what she could—bread tucked beneath her coat, medicine sewn into her clothing—small things that seemed like something. But over time, as the suffering worsened and the walls grew tighter, she realized that what mattered wasn’t what she could take in, but who she might be able to bring out.
Smuggling adults was nearly impossible. They were too visible, too known, too documented. But children were smaller. They could be hidden, if you were clever and fast and willing to risk everything. And so she started with them.
Some were carried out in toolboxes. Some hidden under bricks in wheelbarrows. Some were drugged to sleep and passed through checkpoints on stretchers. Every method was different. Every child was a risk. But she kept going.
By the end of the war, she had helped rescue more than 2,500 children from the ghetto. That’s twice as many lives as Oskar Schindler saved. Most people know his name. Not enough people know hers.
She didn’t do it alone. There were drivers, nuns, neighbors who kept silent when a new child appeared next door. Every one of them risked their lives. And still, they said yes.
She did one other remarkable thing. Irena kept a careful record of every child she helped. She wrote their real names beside the false ones they were given to survive, folded each slip of paper, and placed them in glass jars, which she buried beneath an apple tree in a friend’s backyard. Her hope was that one day the children would return and learn who they really were, and about the families who had made the impossible choice to let them go.
In 1943, the Gestapo arrested her. They beat her, broke her legs, and demanded names. She gave them nothing. She was sentenced to death, but the Resistance bribed a guard and helped her escape. She survived the war and later dug up the jars, trying to reconnect the children with any surviving relatives. Most had none.
Irena never wrote a book or stood on a stage. She stayed in Poland, the same country that nearly killed her, and returned to her work. She lived in a small apartment with worn floors and answered her own door.
When she was finally recognized years later, someone asked how she felt about what she had done. She didn’t talk about bravery or statistics. She said, simply, “I could have done more.”
That sentence has stayed with me. Not because it’s dramatic, but because it’s not. It’s plain. It’s honest. It comes from the kind of person who does what needs to be done and never believes it’s enough.
I keep the day she died on my calendar, not to honor a hero, but to remember what’s possible when we stop waiting for someone else to act. Her life reminds me that you don’t have to fix everything. You just have to do what you can, what’s in front of you. Then do it again. And again. And again.
That’s how she did it. And that’s how the world changes. Not through declarations or applause, but quietly. In ordinary moments. One child at a time. Carried in secret. Buried in memory. Remembered in the ground beneath an apple tree.
And that’s how we change it, too—by recognizing what needs us, and doing what we can. One small act. Then another. Until something shifts.