The Names That Had to Survive: Irena Sendler and the Secret Identities of the Children

Among the many extraordinary dimensions of Irena Sendler’s wartime work, few are as emotionally powerful as the effort to preserve the real identities of Jewish children hidden outside the Warsaw Ghetto. Rescue often required a child to assume a false name, a new family history and, in some cases, a new religious identity in order to survive Nazi-occupied Poland. Yet Sendler and the clandestine network around her understood that survival could not be allowed to become permanent erasure. The children had to live under invented identities, but their real names, families and histories had to be preserved for a future no one could guarantee would ever arrive.

This tension lies at the heart of Irena’s Children, the forthcoming historical drama with two-time Academy Award-nominated and Palme d’Or-winning filmmaker Roland Joffé attached to direct. The story of the hidden names is not simply a story about documentation. It is about identity, memory, family and the hope that, after war and persecution, a child might one day be able to recover the life that survival had forced them to leave behind.