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In chapter ten of Storycatcher, Christina Baldwin writes: "Story has a will to survive that seems almost independent of the storyteller, as though it has a life of its own. … It loves to trick fate, to slip out of the hands of carelessness or destruction, to curl at the edge of darkness waiting and watching for the flicker of welcome."
The story of Irena Sendler waited for nearly 60 years. During World War II, Sendler was a Catholic social worker in Warsaw, Poland. She watched in 1940 as the Nazi occupation forces locked 350,000 Jews into the Warsaw ghetto, an area of sixteen square blocks. Walled off, guarded by German soldiers, people suffered and died from starvation, disease, exposure and violence while waiting for transport to nearby extermination camps. This is the awful, but known story of these times.
 Sendler , a young, Polish Catholic social worker, began to cooperate with Zegota, an underground network, that forged papers for her to enter and leave the ghetto as a public health nurse. Once able to cross that line, she and her colleagues devised ways to sneak Jewish children out of the ghetto and place them in orphanages, convents, and private homes in the surrounding region. From early 1942 until her arrest in October 1943, Sendler saved 2500 children and babies from certain death. Of course the children had to be given new identities, and so, to be able to trace their identities at the end of the war, Sendler recorded the Jewish family name of each child, along with the new Christian name and where they were placed. She buried these names in canning jars under an apple tree at a friend's home.
Though tortured and sentenced to execution, she never revealed the names of her contacts, the existence of the jars, or what she had been doing. On the day of her execution, Zegota bribed a guard who let her escape and posted her name as executed, making her invisible to the Nazis. She went into hiding until January 1945 when Poland was liberated. After the war she dug up her jars handed them over to the network, but only 1% of the Jewish families had survived to try and trace their lost children.
In the atmosphere of Russian occupied Poland after the war and the rigors of living under a Communist government, Irena put her story away. She married, had two children of her own, continued working as a social worker, made a life as best she could. Nobody asked and she didn't tell: but story has a will to survive!
 As dramatic as Sendler's story is, someone had to find it. In 1999, a schoolteacher in Uniontown, Kansas, USA, a rural district with little diversity and no Jewish students, encouraged his students to develop a project for National History Day. Four girls stepped up to the challenge to meet the classroom motto, "He who changes one person, changes the world entire." For starters he handed the girls a small news clipping that said a woman named Irena Sendler had saved 2500 Jewish children and said, "I think this may be a typo because no one has heard of this woman." The girls began their research. They verified the facts, wrote a play called "Life in a Jar," and began to search for Irena's resting place—only to discover a still vibrantly alive ninety-year-old living in a Warsaw nursing home.
The story continues: the girls have been to Poland twice to visit Irena. They have performed the play hundreds of times around the United States and Europe, raised money to help support aging rescuers, appeared on C-SPAN, National Public Radio, been featured in many newspaper and magazine articles—and most importantly, they have kept their focus on the story of a young woman who stepped into her destiny when the world was falling apart around her. They have reunited rescued children (now in their 60s) with Irena and other rescuers, and brought these actions back into honor in the country where they occurred.
 Story is out of the box. The school receives hundreds of letters each year wanting help to develop similar diversity projects. The teacher and district want to develop a curriculum for designing more work like theirs. Their quest remains to prove that one person has the power to change the world.
For more information on this storycatching success please visit:
www.irenasendler.org or http://www.exobus.org/featuresstory.asp?id=514§ion=reg1
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