The Healer of Warsaw
The True Story of a Nurse Who Saved Hundreds During the Holocaust
She came as a nurse. She became their only hope.
Warsaw, 1940. The Nazis have sealed 400,000 Jews inside a crumbling ghetto, where starvation and disease kill more people than bullets. But one woman refuses to let them die without a fight.
Irena Sendler is a Catholic social worker who enters the ghetto daily—not with a gun, but with medicine. As a nurse, she treats the sick. As a healer, she mends broken bodies. As a woman of conscience, she makes an impossible choice.
When the Nazis begin deportations to Treblinka, Irena transforms her medical mission into a rescue operation. She smuggles babies in ambulances, hides children in toolboxes and coffins, and teaches them Catholic prayers to disguise their identity. And she records every name on thin paper, burying the lists in jars beneath an apple tree—hoping one day to reunite the children with families she knows are already dead.
The Healer of Warsaw tells the unforgettable story of a woman who refused to be silent. When the Gestapo finally captured her, they broke her legs and feet. They tortured her for months. But Irena Sendler—nurse, healer, hero—never revealed a single name.
Drawing on extensive research and told with novelistic intensity, this is the first book to focus on Irena Sendler’s work as a nurse: the woman who brought medicine to the dying, hope to the hopeless, and life to 2,500 children who would otherwise have perished.
For readers of The Tattooist of Auschwitz, The Nightingale, and Irena’s Children, here is a story of courage that will heal your faith in humanity.
