How The Nobel Peace Prize Has Lost Its Way...

Why are we dragging our feet on increasing troop levels in Afghanistan? Maybe the winner of the Nobel Peace Prize wants to put some distance between his prize win and increasing the size of a war.

There are a lot of items circulating on the internet right now about how the Nobel Peace Prize has lost its way, and I would like to share one of them with you now. You can look this up and will find the story to be based on facts, at least, according to the World Wide Web, although a lot of the emails circulating right now are a little dodgy on the true details of the story...

Irena Sendler passed away on May 12, 2008, sadly, not as a recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize. Also known as Irena Sendlerowa, she was a Polish social worker who secretly was a member of the Polish Underground, Zegota.

Immediately following the Nazi push into Poland on September 1, 1939, Irena joined with a group of people that created over 3,000 false documents to help smuggle Jews out of Poland.

In 1942, the Zegota appointed Irena as the head of its children's section. As a social worker, Irena had been granted permission to enter the Warsaw ghetto to monitor typhus, charged with ensuring that the disease did not go beyond the ghetto walls.

This afforded Irena the perfect opportunity to head the group's efforts to help Jewish children. Working with as many as 24 other members of Zegota, Irena developed an elaborate scheme by which 2,500 Jewish children were smuggled out of the Warsaw ghetto.

Under the guise of ensuring that a typhoid outbreak did not occur, Irena and her fellow conspirators did everything from carrying out children in false bottoms of supply boxes, to hiding them in ambulances and trams, disguised as packages. 

Once freed by the efforts of Irena and the Zegota, these children were placed with Polish families, orphanages and churches with Irena maintaining records of their original identity and their new identity so that once the occupation was over, they could be reunited with surviving relatives.

Irena hid the records in jars that she buried. In 1943, however, the Nazis had caught on to Irena's involvement in Zegota. She was captured, tortured, and sentence to death. Zegota was able to spare her life by bribing Nazi prison guards, and Irena went into hiding for the remainder of the war.

As soon as the occupation ended, Irena returned to Warsaw, dug up her jars, and began working to reunite the children she had saved with surviving family members. Later, Irena would go on to work with the Polish government in exile during the Soviet occupation. Sadly, this landed her in a Soviet prison where she miscarried her second child. Due to her imprisonment, even upon her release, Irena and her children lost many of the rights afforded to the Polish Soviet citizenry, such as the ability to attend state-run universities.

As early as 1965, Irena began receiving awards from the world community, even though she could not venture out of Soviet Poland to accept these awards until 1983 when she was honored by the Isreali Supreme Court.

In 2003, Pope John Paul II recognized Irena's efforts with a personal letter, and Irena was awarded Poland's highest civilian honor, the Order of the White Eagle. 

In 2007, at the age of 97, Irena was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize, but her life-threatening efforts to free Jewish children from the Nazis, reunite them with their families after the war, and her fight against the Soviets in Poland, just all paled in comparison to former U.S. Vice President Al Gore's efforts to alert the world about Global Warming. Yes, you read that right. If Al Gore is more deserving of the Nobel Peace Prize than Irena Sandler, then the prize itself no longer carries the meaning that it once did. Couple that with the award going to The Magician this year, and I am done with it all together.