Dare to Believe is our new monthly column about men and women who have faced challenges and overcome obstacles to succeed. This month we are featuring two people who exhibited unimaginable courage in the face of danger. I am proud to feature Desmond Doss and Irena Sendler in This Awful Awesome Life.
Desmond Doss (February 7, 1919 – March 23, 2006) – Doss was born in Lynchburg, Virginia. His family were devout Seventh Day Adventists who believed in nonviolence, observing the Sabbath, and a vegetarian diet. He left school after the eighth grade to help support his family during the Great American Depression. When the United States entered World War II, Doss worked in a shipyard as a joiner and was offered a military deferment as an essential worker. He refused to accept the deferment and enlisted in the Army as a conscientious objector. He became a medic assigned to the 2nd Platoon, Company B, 1st Battalion, 307th Infantry, 77th Infantry Division. He was often the subject of ridicule for his religious beliefs and labeled a coward for his refusal to carry a weapon into combat and kill enemy soldiers.
In 1944, while serving with his platoon on Guam and the Philippines, he was awarded two Bronze Stars with a “V” device, the fourth highest military decoration for valor in the United States military, for exceptional valor in aiding wounded soldiers under fire.
During the Battle of Okinawa, Doss saved the lives of 50-100 wounded infantrymen atop the area known as Hacksaw Ridge. He was wounded four times in Okinawa. After being wounded, Doss treated his own wounds and continued to render aid to other wounded soldiers. He also insisted on crawling off a stretcher, so it could be used to transport another more seriously wounded soldier. For his exceptional acts of valor, he was awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor by President Harry S. Truman. When Truman commended him for saving 75 lives on Hacksaw Ridge, Doss modestly insisted it was probably more like 50. According to his fellow soldiers, the number 75 is accurate.
After the war, Doss hoped to return to his work as a carpenter but sever injuries to his left arm prevented this. Doss also contracted Tuberculosis while in the Philippines and had to undergo five and a half years of treatment losing a lung and five ribs. After being discharged from the hospital he was granted a 90% medical disability from the Army. Doss continued to receive treatment from the Army and in 1976, an overdose of antibiotics left him deaf. He was able to regain his hearing with a cochlear implant in 1988.
While struggling with severe health issues, Doss still managed to marry, raise a family, and maintain a farm in Georgia. After his death, he was buried at the National Cemetery in Chattanooga, Tennessee with full military honors. The Academy Award winning film, Hacksaw Ridge is about him. Andrew Garfield stars as Doss.
Irena Stanislawa Sendler (February 15,1910 – May 12, 2008) Sendler was born in Warsaw, Poland. Her father was a physician and humanitarian who treated poor patients (including impoverished Jews) free of charge. Irena studied law and Polish literature at the University of Warsaw where she protested against the “ghetto bench” system of university segregation based on religion. She was disciplined for scratching off the non-Jewish designation on her ID card. Sendler was considered a radical leftist by the University. It blocked her attempts to work in the Warsaw school system.
After becoming a member of the Polish Socialist Party, Sandler was able to work in a legal counseling and social help clinic. Most of her clients were helpless, socially disadvantaged women. She became associated with the social and educational units of the Free Polish University. As a social worker, Sendler reported on the deplorable conditions and extreme poverty in the Jewish ghettos. She joined a group of women social workers. A dozen of these women would later become involved in rescuing Jews during the Holocaust.
Sendler married in 1931. Her husband was mobilized for war and captured by the Germans in 1939. He remained in a German prison camp until 1945.
From 1935 to 1943, Sendler worked for the Department of Social Welfare and Public Health of the City of Warsaw. She got her nursing credentials so she could sneak food and medications into the Warsaw ghetto. Sendler secretly joined the Polish Underground and helped rescue Jews including smuggling thousands of Jewish children from the Warsaw Ghetto with the help of her co-workers. The children were given new names and sent to live with willing Polish families, orphanages or other aid agencies including Catholic convents. In October 1941, the penalty for anyone caught assisting Jews became death.
Sendler kept the real names of all the children they rescued in a jar buried in her backyard, so they could hopefully be reunited with surviving family members after the war. In October 1943, she became the head of the children’s section of Zegota, the Polish Council to Aid Jews.
The German occupiers suspected Sendler was a member of the Underground. They arrested her and searched her home and office for information on the child smuggling activities. When their searches found nothing, they tortured her, breaking both of her legs, trying to make her reveal the other members of her group and the whereabouts of the missing children, but Sendler refused to talk. She was sentenced to death but escaped on the day she was scheduled to be executed after Zegota bribed German officials.
After the war, Sendler devoted herself to reuniting children with their families, but most of the 2500 children’s parents died in the extermination camp, Treblinka or were listed as missing. So much information about Jewish families was destroyed by the Nazis, her task was nearly impossible. Sendler pursued a government career in Communist Poland.
Sendler received many honors for her work rescuing children during the war including the Gold Cross of Merit from the Polish People’s Republic. In 1965, she was recognized by Yad Vashem as one of the Polish Righteous Among the Nations. She became an honorary citizen of Israel in 1991.
Sendler’s activities were relatively unknown in North America until a group of students in a Kansas high school produced a play based on their research of her life. Titled, “Life in a Jar,” the play became a hit and was adapted for television. “The Courageous Heart of Irena Sandler” (2009) starred Anna Paquin.
https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/56157/11-incredible-acts-courage