Irena Sendler, my Irena

By António Carlos dos Santos

History records the actions of a great hero, the spy and member of the National Socialist German Workers' Party, Oskar Schindler, who saved approximately 1,200 Jews during the genocide perpetrated by the Nazis. The German industrialist employed Jews in his enamelware and munitions factories, located in Poland and then Czechoslovakia.

Irena Sendler, using only her professional position - a social worker in the Warsaw Department of Social Welfare - and employing great courage, creativity, and altruism, managed to save more than 2,500 Jewish children.

"The Angel of the Warsaw Ghetto," as Irena Sendler became known, managed to save thousands of lives by convincing Polish Christian families to hide and shelter in their homes the little ones whose cardinal sin - from the F hrer's perspective - was being the children of Jewish parents.

Period: World War II, Poland occupied by Nazi Germany. The far-right ideology that systematized scientific racism and took antisemitism to its extreme with the Final Solution implemented the elimination of Jews from the European continent.

The war unleashed by the Nazis - the largest conflagration on the planet - mobilized 100 million soldiers, causing the greatest carnage ever experienced by humanity, between 50 and 70 million deaths, including absolute barbarity, the Holocaust, the genocide, the mass murder of 6 million Jews.

This is the context that inspired the author to write the play "Irena Sendler, My Irena".

To support the dramatic plot, Ant nio Carlos delved deeply into historical research, conducting extensive investigations that gave the play a disturbing realism, prompting reflections on the reasons that lead man to become so excessively entrenched in the vile, the sinister, the malevolent. On the other hand, as if unveiling the other side of the same coin, it highlights real-life characters like Irena Sandler, beings who, even in the face of adversity and the most atrocious brutality, invariably choose altruism, charity, and light.

It is when the author interweaves reality with fiction that the rich and unusual universe emerges, with intense characters - of complex psychological construction - cunning machinations, intrigues and Machiavellian conspiracies, plots and subterfuges designed to offer the reader - not catharsis, ecstasy, or rapture - but rather critical reflection and the oxygenation of thought.

Divided into eight acts, the play brings to light the process of dehumanization constructed by different political currents. Under the Nazi regime, Irena Sandler was imprisoned and tortured - only not executed because she managed to escape. The end of the war in 1945, which should have brought freedom, instead subjected the "Angel of the Ghetto" to new violence, new intolerance, and new repression. A new authoritarianism dominated Poland and Eastern Europe. As dark and cruel as that of Hitler, Heydrich, Goebbels, Hess, and Mengele, a new system emerged promising an egalitarian society without social classes, based on the common ownership of the means of production. Like the fascist regime, the communist dictatorship also planned to create a new man, a new world. Besides continuing to persecute Irena, it erased her from history books and official historiography, a situation that would only cease with the collapse of the communist empire and the rise of democracy in Poland in 1989.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: B0H4VXWG5X
• ISBN13: 9798181048591
• Release Date: June 2026
• Publisher: Independently Published
• Length: 314 Pages
• Weight: 0.93 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 6.0" x 9.0"