Anna Bikont is one of Poland’s most important investigative journalists and reporters, a long-time editor at Gazeta Wyborcza. She is known above all for her celebrated book The Crime and the Silence, devoted to the Jedwabne massacre and its troubled memory. In the case of Sendler she worked for years, reaching testimonies of witnesses, archival documents, letters, and memoirs of both rescued children and those involved in the conspiracy. The result is a biographical reportage whose goal is not glorification but the conscientious restoration of historical truth.

Irena Sendler was an activist of Żegota — the clandestine Council to Aid Jews — and a social worker who during World War II organised a network smuggling Jewish children out of the Warsaw Ghetto. It is estimated that thanks to her efforts approximately 2,500 children survived. She hid the personal details of the rescued in jars buried in a garden. Arrested by the Gestapo in 1943 and tortured, she betrayed no one. After the war she lived in obscurity for decades.

Bikont reconstructs this history with meticulous reportorial precision, but also with an awareness of its complexity. She shows that Sendler operated in an environment where heroism and tragedy were constantly intertwined — where saving one child sometimes meant being unable to save another. Bikont also confronts the myth that grew up around Sendler after 2001, when her story was popularised by a stage production by a group of American schoolchildren. She separates legend from reality — and in doing so makes the portrait of Sendler more credible and more profound.

The book is at the same time a story about wartime and postwar Poland — about how difficult choices were in the Ghetto, how complicated relations were between Jews and Poles, and how long Sendler’s heroism remained unacknowledged in the country where she lived.