Luminous Pluck: The Story of a World War II Heroine

The following is adapted from a white-coat dedication address to entry-level nursing students at Saint Mary’s College, Notre Dame, Indiana, on Oct. 5, 2024.

Uniontown, Kansas, is a tiny little town just over 100 miles south and east of Topeka, close to Fort Scott and the Missouri border. And when I say tiny, I mean tiny: Population 293 as of the 2020 census.

Put Uniontown in the back of your mind. I’ll ask you to recall it later on.

For now, though, this is a celebration and an important one — a way of marking the weighty significance that you are beginning your patient care clinicals. It’s no longer just theory and textbooks; it’s real, and there’s a real person with a real beating heart at the other end of your stethoscope — not just another manikin.

Maybe you’ve heard me say that nursing school is a lot like driver’s ed — that there’s only so much you can learn in the classroom or from books. At some point, you have to get in a car and drive.

That’s what this ceremony is about: You’re beginning to drive. You’re taking all that passion for care and service that got you here for nursing school in the first place, and translating it into action.

You’re doing it, and I know you can’t believe it sometimes: Head-to-toe assessments, giving shots, hanging IVs, all manner of skills and interventions. Plus, all manner of human encounters — the talking and listening, the soothing and caring, the coming alongside of total strangers in some of their most vulnerable moments.

Rewarding, to be sure, and a privilege, but no cakewalk. It’s tough getting up for 7 a.m. clinicals; it’s tough having done all the preassessment groundwork, only to discover that your patient was discharged and you’re picking up a new patient on the fly; it’s tough organizing your clinical day, prioritizing tasks, and yet remaining flexible as circumstances change.

But you are tough — tough as in “salty,” and, even though I know that’s not how St. Matthew used the word salt in the Gospel reading you chose for today’s ceremony, I still want to affirm you as being the “salty” of the world — tough, enduring, pressing on as you grow into this demanding profession.

And light, too — the “light of the world,” especially in terms of reflecting a light greater than yourselves, the light of grace, the light of Christ. You’re putting yourself out there, mixing it up with other caregivers, extending yourself for your patients — doing the “good deeds” that Matthew mentions, and giving glory to God in the process.

Yes, you’re actually doing the things you envisioned yourselves doing when you first thought about nursing, plus you’re assimilating, embracing, and demonstrating a mindset of compassionate, selfless service — something that really is at the heart of what nursing is all about.

That mindset is especially vital today, for you’re entering the healthcare workforce at a delicate, even fragile time. Social and cultural upheaval; financial and economic strain; political division, ideological brawling, and even a loss of consensus about simple right and wrong — even when it comes to something as basic as the value of human life, all human life, its sacred dignity and infinite worth.

Consequently, there’s an urgent need for caregivers who can rise above the chaos and provide compassionate care to everyone in need, no matter the challenges — and no matter who gets the credit.

Let me give you a historical illustration of what I’m getting at — a hero from World War II: The Polish Catholic social worker and caregiver, Irena Sendler.

Born in 1910, Irena grew up with the example of a physician father who treated everyone who required it, Jews and non-Jews alike, for example, despite the anti-Semitic currents of the time. Adopting a similarly altruistic outlook, Irena studied and took up social work, just as the shadow of war spread across Europe in the late 1930s.

The Nazis invaded Poland in 1939, and the next year they rounded up the 350,000 Jews of Warsaw and walled them up along with other refugees into the notorious Warsaw ghetto — an area about 3/4 the size of the Notre Dame’s campus — where almost a half million men, women, and children were forcibly detained. There was severe crowding, poor sanitation, and limited food and medicine. Sendler was determined that she had to act, but social workers were restricted from the ghetto. So, at great risk, she managed to pass herself off as a nurse, which gave her access and allowed her to get needed supplies to the ghetto’s suffering masses.

In time, Sendler joined an underground resistance movement that, among other things, sought to smuggle out as many Jewish children as possible and shuttle them to safety. She’d have to beg the parents to let them try. “Can you guarantee they will live?” the parents would ask. “We had to admit honestly that we could not,” she said, adding, “The only guarantee was that the children would most likely die if they stayed.”

In the end, Irena and her friends helped over 2,500 Jewish kids to safety — an astonishing number. They would sneak the children out of the ghetto, sometimes sedated, in boxes and suitcases, even coffins, and then send them on to convents, schools and orphanages with fake papers.

Irena worked hard to keep track of the children’s real names and identifying information through coded records that she stored in jars buried in a garden. When she was captured by the Nazis in 1943, she refused to reveal the whereabouts of those jars or any of her underground contacts, and was first tortured, then sentenced to death. Thanks to bribes from her comrades, Irena was able to escape captivity, but she nonetheless returned to resistance work, including more shuttling of Jews to freedom.

After the war concluded, Irena dug up the jars in that garden and tried to reunite the children she’d helped rescue with their families, but too often their parents had not survived the death camps. Some of those children were adopted by families in Israel, where Irena’s story began to circulate. That led to her being recognized by the state’s Holocaust authority as Righteous Among the Nations in 1965, although her amazing accomplishments were hardly known at all in her Polish homeland.

Okay, that’s the story of Irena Sendler’s adventures, and, although not technically a nurse, I trust her commitment to doing the right thing for others, no matter the cost, is inspiring to you as future nurses. Plus, she was “salty” in the best sense of the word, and she brilliantly reflected the “light” of love and truth.

But there’s more to this story, and here’s where Uniontown, Kansas, comes into play.

As I noted, Sendler was basically forgotten in her homeland, but eventually the bare outline of her story did trickle out into public awareness, and it was included in a 1994 news magazine article about unsung Holocaust heroes. In 1999, that article came to the attention of a handful of Uniontown teens working on a school history project, and they dug deep to uncover as much as they could about this remarkable, courageous woman.

Not dissuaded by a lack of online resources, these salty girls assembled some 4,000 pages of primary material, and translated their research into an enlightened play, “Life in a Jar” — a reenactment of Sendler’s tale, which they staged to fulfill their history assignment.

But they weren’t done. Their investigations led to the discovery that Irena Sendler was still alive! She was well into her 90s, impoverished and living in utter obscurity in Warsaw. So, this small crew of Kansas high school students raised enough funds to travel to Poland in 2001 to meet their hero and get a firsthand account of her amazing exploits. And they remained in touch with her for the next seven years until Sendler’s death.

Word got out about this unusual trans-Atlantic and inter-generational friendship, and that, along with the growing popularity of the play, finally brought real attention, even global attention, to Sendler’s amazing feats. Indeed, there are hints that Sendler had been on the short list of nominees for the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize.

That she didn’t receive that honor was utterly irrelevant to her. “I only did what any decent person would do,” she said. “The heroes were the babies — they were the heroes of their mothers’ hearts. It was the parents and grandparents who gave up their children, they were the true heroes.”

It’s this kind of humility, bravery and rectitude that energized those Kansas teens to impact the world through their own pluck and luminous vision. As Megan Felt, one of those teens, put it, Irena taught her and her friends that “one person can make a difference.”

And isn’t that what nursing’s all about? I think so, and I know that you yourselves are making a difference — already! Press ahead, and soon you, too, will be inspiring others to be salty and bright lights in a hurting world.

For information about how to host a performance of “Life in a Jar” in your community, go to The Irena Sendler Project.