Being judgmental is being in conflict. Conflict is not conducive to happiness. While judgment is necessary to guide and protect ourselves through life, using it to form opinions of people with frightening speed based on limited information doesn’t serve us well.
WWWClarity increases when we avoid the urge of being judgmental as it helps us greatly to see what is really happening, unclouded by an indulgent knee-jerk emotional response. It helps us to accept those people who are not as we wish them to be, bypassing the negative wasted energy of laboring under the assumption of how people should behave and think. When we indulge in this activity, we are really becoming upset that the world is not living up to our expectations, and not a path to being happier.
WWWWe don’t have to personalize the behavior of other people when it doesn’t affect us. Their actions may be repulsive, distasteful or unacceptable to our standard of decorum, but just because it is, doesn’t mean it’s synonymous with they being wrong or immoral. Resisting this urge moves us closer to kindness, and kindness is an infinitely superior path to happiness. It also makes us happier because people sense our nature as easily as smelling burnt toast, and respond  to us accordingly.
WWWBeing overly judgmental is the work of our ego, attempting to elevate itself above the person or group being judged as better, smarter, or morally superior; then to sanctimoniously condemn. It only satisfies the tyranny of the ego, and is detrimental to our happiness.
WW
In his book, Handbook to Higher Consciousness. Ken Keyes writes these select passages.

“What do I want to change in the outside world instead of doing the inner work of changing my own response to it?”

“Your ego and your rational mind labor under the harsh programming that there is a certain special way the world should be and the people around you should act—and it is up to your rational mind to put it all aright”

“Whether you enjoy your life continuously, or constantly harass yourself, depends upon how well you learn to simply change what is changeable without throwing people out of your heart.”

From our primitive ancestors who feared all outsiders as a survival mechanism, tribalism seems to written into our DNA. We strongly identify with the group to which we belong, and many times suspect, even fear, others outside of it. There are many avenues in which it can insidiously seep in—racial groups, income strata, religious belief, sexual orientation, national origin, other neighborhood, other country, etc., all of it spelling separation from others, away from acceptance, which again, does not serve us well.
WWWMany of us live by a set of institutional dogmas that are hard and fast—a binary system of good and bad—contributing to narrow thinking with zero understanding, laying a prime foundation for harsh judgment to flourish. Taking a closer look at those doctrines to determine if they tend to separate you from, rather than embrace people, will go a long way. It may be necessary to rise above such a staunch, restrictive and biased position.

Since judgment comes so naturally and easily to us, breaking the habit is difficult. Being more aware when the urge presents itself, and perhaps reminding yourself of some of the thoughts this article expresses will hopefully have an impact on changing. It will also be of great help to keep in mind that when you are less judgmental of others, you will also be less judgmental of yourself, increasing your self-esteem.
WWWKnow that the vast majority of people are doing the best they can in the heat of living and coping with life, which will tend to bring some compassion into the game and derail the judgment impulse. We all judge, at the same time, we all love to be treated kindly. Kindness or condemnation is the choice.

If you want the truth to stand clear before you, never be for or against. The struggle between “for” and “against” is the mind’s worst disease.
—Sent-ts’an, 700 A.D.

© Joe Arrigo

John F. Kennedy said, “The great enemy of truth is often not the lie—deliberate, contrived, and dishonest—but the myth—persistent, persuasive, and unrealistic.” 

These convictions come from belief systems; something we all have in one form or another. A belief system can be thought of as the mental acceptance of a proposition, statement, or concept as true on the grounds of apparent authority, which does not have to be based on actual fact. Many of these beliefs, ideas, or convictions have been programmed into us since childhood, many of them without any basis of reason, where hope and wishful thinking are mistaken for knowledge; and become powerful because they are a large part of our identity, and thus have great influence over our lives.

Belief systems are usually rigid rather than flexible, narrow rather than broad, closed rather than open, and immobilizing rather than liberating. It is our belief systems that we use to make judgments about the world and about any given situation as being true, good, bad, happy; where we become so emotionally invested in protecting them, facts to the contrary are rendered invisible; seeing only what aligns with and supports our beliefs. They tend to make us think in binary terms, either right or wrong, good or bad, moral or immoral, whereby knee-jerk conclusions are drawn; painting things with a broad brush into gross generalizations in a frail and lazy misguided attempt to simplify the complexities and nuances of life.

The conscious mind may want to make logically precise decisions, yet the unconscious mind wants to feel good. There are times when we know down deep that we are in conflict with our own intellect and common sense when defending our beloved belief system. We turn our back on, and abandon our intellect in order to cling to, and protect, our precious ideological comfort zone, disallowing ourselves to know what we know. If we resist and dismiss that “annoying” nudge, and doggedly continue along the same path of thought out of shear pride and allegiance, we dishonor and deny our intellect, our inner voice, and the integrity of our true and better selves. Neuroscientist and brain researcher from Yale, Paul MacLean laments,

You know what bugs me most about the brain? It’s that the limbic system, this primitive brain that can neither read nor write, provides us with the feeling of what is real, true, and important.

The operative word in Dr. MacLean’s quote is feeling, infused with certainty based on our belief, then becoming our option to either engage our intellect as to the veracity of that feeling, or just blindly and passively ride with it. Intransigent belief constructs a mental  barrier to further knowledge and understanding; where nothing, not even irrefutable evidence, will cause it to consider or yield to that information. A great example of this in action happened when I was watching the Rachel Maddow Show airing from Alaska in 2010 when Joe Miller was running for Senator. She interviewed some of his supporters on the street protesting against Eric Holder the Attorney General, regarding and opposing his position on gun control, as they perceived it. She asked one woman holding up a Joe Miller campaign sign,
“Can I just ask, why are you upset about Eric Holder.”
She replies, “I know that he is anti-gun.”
Rachel, “What has he done that’s anti-gun?”
The woman then utters these vacuous words, “I don’t have all the facts but I know that he is anti-gun.”
Then Rachel asked a man participating in the rally the same question; and his reply?,
“I don’t know enough about that to answer that truthfully, Rachel.”

These people who behave solely from the feeling they receive from their limbic system that Paul MacLean depicts in the above quote, do so without the slightest inclination of pausing or questioning it with their intellect, and gather information. This immediate functionality of the limbic system served our primitive ancestors well ensuring their survival by allowing them to react swiftly in the face of imminent death, bypassing the slower conscious assessment of a perilous situation, providing an instantaneous interpretation to environmental stimuli—no conscious thought necessary. This primitive responsiveness lives within us still, and doesn’t serve us well interpreting modern world problems unless we make the effort to consciously assess those feelings bubbling-up from our primitive brain.

As enlightening and insidious as Dr. MacLean’s insight is, we nevertheless have the ability to identify our own illogical fallacies, and can therefore, if we choose, manage them with deliberation—we can disown flawed beliefs and replace them. And yes, it requires considerable fortitude to challenge long held beliefs; they are comfortable, perhaps loyal to a particular group, familiar, and cherished, and can even conjure up warm memories of the way it was, carrying the baton for the people we love or loved. Beliefs can also come from self-serving bias, self-deception, and early institutional programming; in short, an integral part of the culture in which we were raised and conditioned. When we dare to challenge them we feel the fear of the unknown as we venture beyond what we previously established as our safe boundaries. We must take heart however, and remember that the realm of the unknown is precisely the place where solutions to unsolved problems are found.

As Ayn Rand points out in her book, Philosophy: Who Needs It, we all need a philosophy, “Your choice is whether you define your philosophy by a conscious, rational, disciplined process of thought—or let your subconscious accumulate a junk heap of unwarranted conclusions [and] false generalizations…”

This does not mean we abandon our intuition…our inner voice; it does mean we use it along with good information, and in doing so; we open up the potential to become both more competent and more liberated. Acting on knowledge works far better than acting on belief. Alexander Green writes, “Genuine faith is belief in the absence of evidence, not belief in spite of the evidence.”

Hard and fast belief systems tend to make us react automatically to certain new information…sort of a robotic reflex-action, similar to the fight-or-flight syndrome, circumventing our invaluable intellect to analyze objectively; where new information bypasses the intellect, surrendering it over to the primitive brain that is the limbic system, similar to a short circuit in an electrical system which bypasses the functional circuitry. That mechanism, left unchecked, locks us into a mental state, surreptitiously slipping by our awareness that we do have a choice. And choice is our greatest power. Developing the fortitude to hold those beliefs up to scrutiny removes the sentry at the gate of our minds whose role it is to filter out all information that doesn’t align with, protect, and caress our old beliefs.

We’re all aware that most of the directives in our life emanate from our subconscious—without our awareness—and therefore, if we don’t make a concerted effort to engage our conscious intellect of those things we are aware of whenever we can, we willingly forfeit all control over how we think and our lives. We wholly empower ourselves by becoming free thinkers. It’s of paramount importance that we are prepared to detach from our belief systems when we recognize good information screams foul, because they govern our behavior and determine our decisions through life; being on constant vigil for what we want to believe is true, isn’t the driving force for what we believe is true; and entails pausing, and consulting our intellect, always. The bottom line is developing the courage to be intellectually honest with ourselves.

“For those who invest and then drop out of the game and never pay a single unnecessary cost, the odds in favor of success [in the stock market] are awesome,” proclaims John Bogle, founder of Vanguard Funds and the author of The Little Book of Common Sense Investing.

As a guy who’s made just about every stock market mistake in the book, what I’m going to share with you here addresses every one of those mistakes…finally. I was undermined several times by my emotions to sell-off when the market tanked, then get back in again trying to time the market—a losing proposition. As Warren Buffett puts it, “For investors as a whole, returns decrease as motion increases.”

I’ve read a plethora of investment books including authors who claim to know Warren Buffett’s strategy, attended investment classes, purchased “money making” software, did point-and -figure charting, pursued the up-trending sectors with that charting, used bullish-percentage charting, studied moving average charting in conjunction with both Relative Strength Index (RSI) and Moving Average Convergence-Divergence (MACD) charting, subscribed to an investment letter, attended product seminars, listened religiously to investment broadcasts, etc., all proved nothing more than financial snake-oil. As Peter Lynch wrote, “Thousands of experts study overbought indicators, oversold indicators, head-and-shoulder patterns, put-call-ratios, the Fed’s policy on money supply, foreign investment, the movement of the constellations through the heavens, and the moss on oak-trees, and they can’t predict the markets with any useful consistency, any more than the gizzard squeezers could tell the Roman emporers when the Hun’s would attack.”

Like the vast majority of investors, I’m just a layman, a light-weight, and was managing dumb money, a light-year removed from the Buffett and Cramer guru types. And we laymen are dealing with an animal that by its nature, is schizophrenic, affected by every tidbit of emotional news on a daily basis…it goes up it goes down, it goes down it goes up, in many cases for no good reason, even contrary to reason, making it an emotional roller-coaster-ride for most of us, and maddening to deal with.

Until I read Green. That’s Alexander Green, in his book The Gone Fishin’ Portfolio. Every once in a while someone comes along and clears the air, offering insight that elicits the aha moment. Alexander Green is one of those people. I picked up his book to brief through it expecting another typical rehash of investment babble-talk. Well, surprise, enlightenment! Writing with great clarity, his approach is conceptual, not merely suggestions, but exactly what to do. Yes, he is a guru who picks stocks and most of the time beats the S&P, but denounces that approach unless you’re prepared to do as he does—eat, drink and sleep stock picking as a pro; instead he shows the layman how to invest smart with shear simplicity, bringing the emotionalism always attendant with the stock market to near zero. 

Green writes, “Fortunately, the Gone Fishin’ Portfolio take’s life’s unavoidable risks and uncertainties and turns them into your ally. It allows you to reach financial independence, not because of how much you know, but, ironically, by conceding how much you don’t know.” So let’s get right to it. The three main constructs are these:

• Index Mutual Funds
• Rebalancing at Year End
• Extremely Broad Diversification

Index funds are used because of the low expenses they offer. Typically index funds’ expenses are 75% lower than managed funds; this is not to be confused with loaded funds which is an up-front fee just for the honor of buying the fund—index funds are no-load funds.  Total expenses are far more important than most people realize. The following graphic I think, says it all:

The above data comes from John Bogle’s book mentioned earlier, The Little Book of Common Sense Investing, and is an excellent compliment to Alexander Green’s book. You can see the phenomenal impact costs have on returns. Beside the low expense costs, index funds don’t have the expenses of the buy and sell trading within the fund because they don’t trade; and therefore you’ll avoid paying the income tax charged each year on the declared capital gains of stocks sold-off from managed funds.  Since you won’t be trading stocks yourself you’ll avoid trading commissions, and by being self-directed, you’ll also escape managed portfolio fees. As the graph shows, costs to Wall Street eat up the lions share of your investments, where the first year eats 2%, the 10th year 21%, the 30th year 50%, and by the 50th, 70%. Bogle writes, ” The investor who put up 100% of the capital and assumed 100% of the risk, earned 32% of the market return.”

Point 2, and my favorite, there is rebalancing at the end of the year. Green outlines ten broadly diversified index funds for you with a certain percentage allotted for each fund. At the end of the year you would rebalance those percentages to their original percentage amounts. Those that did well, a portion would be sold off, and those that didn’t you’d buy more shares. What is the great value in this? It forces you to do what eludes the great majority of investors—Buy Low and Sell High! Very neat.

Point 3, a broadly diversified uncorrelated fund portfolio reducing risk dramatically, diversifying with large cap, small cap, international, emerging, some gold, REIT’s, and bonds; all with index funds. That’s basically the concept. Again, a quote from the Oracle of Omaha, Warren Buffett, “That’s when dumb money becomes smart money;” Peter Lynch, Jim Cramer and William Bernstein agree.

The S&P Indices Versus Active funds scorecard (SPIVA) studies show indexes beating actively-traded funds in almost every asset class, style and fund category. Over the last five years more than 65% of the large-cap active managers trailing behind the S&P 500, more than 81% of mid-cap funds were outperformed by the S&P MidCap 400, and over 77% of the small-cap funds were outperformed by the S&P SmallCap 600. This is just as true for bond funds. Then it follows, portfolios of actively managed mutual funds underperform portfolios of all index funds, not only because active funds underperform individually, but because a portfolio of them underperforms even more as there is a compounding of negatives in play. I think two of the reasons managed funds don’t perform as well is because of the internal trading costs they incur from buying and selling, and the fact many hold large amounts of cash and are not fully invested in the market as index funds always are.

 The other very significant point I learned about the market from John Bogle other than the insidious monumental costs that can ravage your investment, is becoming aware of and taking comfort in what has consistently occurred in the stock market for two-hundred years—Reversion to Mean.

As an example, this chart depicts the S&P 500 growth for the last 25 years. To it I added a mean-line (in red), a straight trend-line representing where something started and where it is now. The straggly line is the actual gyrations of the S&P Index for that time period, and what you will notice is that however the gyrations behave, there is always a Reversion to the Mean—the gyrations always return to the mean-line…the arrows show five of them. You might look at the mean-line as reflecting the actual growth of businesses, and the market gyrations as a mad-dance around it due to societal emotionalism, always returning to mean after the emotional highs and lows of investors and speculators subside and return to Earth. So, what does that time-honored unchanging fact mean to you utilizing this strategy? When you rebalance each fund each year, you take advantage of the market every time it goes above or below that mean-line. You sell off some profits of those funds at year end that have increased in value to reestablish their original percentages, and buy more shares of the funds that decreased in value  reestablishing their original percentages. When the market inevitably returns back to the mean-line you have capitalized on it in both instances, working both ends to your favor—worth mentioning again, buying low and selling high. You are actually counting on uncertainty—making it your ally—rather than going through the typical hand-wringing experience that accompanies the unknown. 

This of course is a long term investment strategy, a Pulitzer Prize winning one at that, won by Harry Markowitz in 1990 when his paper proved how a portfolio constructed of uncorrelated assets allow you to master uncertainty and generate excellent investment results, and not the proverbial get rich quick nonsense. It greatly frees up your time dealing with it only once a year, thus the title Gone Fishin’ , but perhaps more importantly it releases you emotionally from the constant churning of the market and relentless angst over what the market is going to do next.

Out of the last nine years up to and including 2011, this portfolio and concept beat the S&P 500 eight times with less risk. This year, 2012, it didn’t, yet I still received a 12.4% return. When the S&P 500 does falter, as it will, I will buy more of its shares since it’s one of funds of the portfolio, and have an excellent chance of beating it because of the broad diversification I hold. Is this a guarantee? Absolutely not. What it is, is a mechanism that puts the odds dramatically in your favor for success—in life, you can’t ask for much more than that.

Scientists increasingly believe we can sculpt our brain circuitry, reshape our outlook, by understanding the reasons our brain works the way it does. Despite the programming our brains received through a millennia of trying to survive from being lunch for a host of predators, we seemingly can overcome that default setting that doesn’t serve us very well in the modern world.

Two small parts of our brain structure, the hippocampus and the amygdala, helped to keep our ancient ancestors alive by alerting them of the dangers that surrounded their everyday lives. Those two glands are a part of the limbic system—the reptilian brain—that works mostly on a subconscious level to pull together bits of information, forming memories that is key to recognizing life threatening danger. The amygdala can register a “threat level red” before the conscious mind gets the message.

Because it evolved over a time when danger was rampant everywhere, we have developed a “negativity bias,” alive and well with us today. Evolution favored those who were able to react with lightening speed, and we have inherited that instinct.; seemingly written into our DNA. As Dr. Rick Hanson, neuropsychologist and author of, Just One Thing: Developing a Buddha Brain One Simple Practice at a Time, puts it, “The brain is like Velcro for everything negative and Teflon for the positives.” In his book, he presents 52 favorite simple mind actions to strengthen your neural networks toward a happier mental state.

So, burdened with this battle-hardened programmed negativity from our ancient past, how can we infuse a more lighter joyful existence? The same way you build your body by working out, the brain has the same capacity to be trained in the direction you want it to go—fundamentally it’s a numbers game. We need a net surplus of cheer…that simple. The ratio is 3 to 1. Three joyful experiences to every downer. “Three to one is the tipping point that leads to a happier life,” says Dr. Barbara Fredrickson, director of the Positive Emotions Lab at the University of North Carolina. It’s a tipping point where you can become more resilient to adversity, bounce back from setbacks and connect better to others. We are talking about “genuine heartfelt positive emotions,” not the Pollyannaish insincere facade of “being positive,” always pumping sunshine. The kind of mental states that Dr. Fredrickson speaks of are things like openness, appreciative and curious, from which spring positive emotions. In describing openness for instance, she makes us aware that all too often we’re preoccupied with the past, the future, or both; rendering ourselves oblivious to the goodness that surrounds us in the moment—an awareness that can bring joy, dampening the insidious amygdala effect. Dr. Rick Hanson adds, “By striving to seek out more upbeat encounters every day and savoring them to the max, you can gradually weave positive experiences into the fabric of your brain.”

In addition, there is also the “facial feedback response,” where simply smiling more conditions the brain away from negativity. Another powerful activity is exercise, where evidence shows that it grows neurons that are less reactive to stress. “Exercise may buffer the brain from stressful situations,” says Dr John Ratey, an associate Clinical Professor of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School and author of, “Spark: The Revolutionary New Science of Exercise and the Brain. He advisie us, “Think of exercise as medicine,” and that, “Exercise is the single most powerful tool you have to optimize your brain function.”

So, we have the tools to control and remold the “negative bias” handed down to us by our beleaguered ancestors.

View this short talk by Dr. Barbara Fredrickson, being especially attentive to the ending story and the last few profound words.:

According to the ancient Mayans, December 21, 2012 is the end of their Long Count calendar which has been repeated 12 times, the 13th ending in 2012, capping a full 5,200 year Mayan cycle of creation. This is being interpreted by the never ending march of dooms-day predictors as the coming apocalypse which will occur on December 21st. The initials GMT shown in the picture at left stands for Goodman-Martinez-Thompson, the three early scholars who compiled the evidence correlating the Julian calendar, predominant in Europe in the 16th century, with the Maya calendar. This apocalypse has gained a lot of traction the last couple of years in the media. and many people seem to be taking it seriously; much of the allure, I believe, coming from the romantic mystery and wisdom they place in ancient texts. 

One fear is that the planet called Nibiru is aimed at earth. Self-proclaimed Nibiru expert Nancy Lieder, who claims she is in contact with aliens from the binary star system 39 light-years from Earth, Zeta Reticuli, first said Nibiru would destroy us in May 2003, has now changed it to December 21, 2012. If such a planet was headed our way, it would already be visible to the naked eye.

Another fear is that planets or stars might line up in ways that will transform Earth—the sun will cross in front of the plane of our galaxy and have a catastrophic impact on Earth, however, the sun already does this twice a year.

Fear the Earth’s geographical poles marking the axis of rotation, or its magnetic poles will flip-flop. One of the many fortuitous facts about our solar system is that Earth has a large moon which stabilizes our planet’s spin. Occasionally over long periods of time of about 500,000 years, our ploes do reverse, not suddenly, and if they did, the only inconvenience would be to change our compasses.

People who have a strong inclination to a doomsday scenario look for reasons, such as above, to jusitfy their emotional state. Sort of like carrying a hammer looking for nails to pound. I’m fascinated when I watch the program, Doomsday Preppers on the History Channel, at the lengths these people go through in preparing themselves for what they believe is a coming monumental disaster. They’re prepping for TEOTWAWKI, a survivalist shorthand for “the end of the world as we know it,” from causes such as solar flares, nuclear attack, dirty bombs, economic collapse and gigantic storms, storing hoards of food and water, and arming themselves with enough arms to start a small war.

So why have visions of impending doom been with us throughout history across the world? What is the fascination, the allure? Does it reside in our DNA, driven by our evolutionary biology, programming us to pay far more attention to the barrage of negative news we all receive every day than good news? It seems so. We have the amygdala gland, designed to be on high alert for anything threatening survival, always looking for something to fear—a propensity for bad news; and that single psychological element called cognitive bias impacts our fundamental view of the world as getting worse; skewing our perspective into such a morose cynicism as to bring some people to question if it’s morally responsible to bring a child into such a corrupt, violent and troubled world.

The amygdala can register a “threat level red” before the conscious mind gets the message. Because it evolved over a time when danger was rampant everywhere, we developed a negativity bias which is alive and well today, where evolution favored those who were able to react with lightening speed. We have inherited that instinct. As Dr. Rick Hanson, neuropsychologist, puts it, “The brain is like Velcro for everything negative and Teflon for the positives.” Is it possible these dooms-day sooth-seers have an oversized and overly active amygdala, their minds seeing and super-charging everything through the lens of their own survival or demise?

Professor of religion, Lorenzo DiTommaso from Concordia University in Montreal found that apocalyptic beliefs have been rising in the past 50 years while researching his upcoming book, The Archtecture of Apocalypticism. As to its cause, he states, “Problems have become so big, with no solutions in sight, that we no longer see ouselves able as human beings to solve these problems. From a biblical point of view, God is going to solve them; from other points of view, there has to be some sort of tradegy.” So it seems these people view an apocalyptic event as a reset button to straighten everything out, and every one straight. DiTommaso says, “Despite fire, death and destruction, the god of apocalypticism is a god of order, not chaos, that’s the reassurance.” So it seems, doomsdayers find comfort by looking for order through chaos.

We have the Christian belief in The Rapture, where Jesus will return to save only the believers by literally lifting them into paradise leaving everyone else to perish. Eighty-five percent of Muslim Shiites called the Islamic Twelvers, believe in the appearance of a 12th imam who disappeared in the ninth century and will return to bring light to the world and cleanse it through apocalyptic catastrophe; where Islam will rule. Martin Luther predicted the world would end no later than 1600. Then there is William Miller, a 19th century New York farmer and Baptist preacher interpreting the Bible from the Book of Revelation, preached apocalypse between 1843 and 1844, yet its passing did not disillusion his followers which now number sixteen million known as Seventh Day Adventists. Just a few others within the arm’s length list of apocalyptic predictors who missed their dates are Jean Dixon, Jim Jones, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Pat Robertson, Isaac Newton, Christopher Columbus, Louis Farrakhan, Nostradamus, Edgar Cayce, The Amazing Criswell and Jerry Falwell. And now we have the 2012 apocalpse, so utterly entrenched in our society, Hollywood did a movie about it; along with a host of television programming and scores of articles feeding the frenzied fascination.

All I can say is, have a nice December 22nd, and, Happy Joyous Holidays.

Irena Sendler saved 2,500 children from the Nazis. Irena created a network of about 30 rescuers she recruited in Poland to smuggle children out of the Warsaw Ghetto.

The Warsaw Ghetto was a 16 block area surrounded by seven foot walls where 500,000 Polish Jews were herded into to await certain death. As a health worker approved to enter the ghetto, Irena sneaked children out between 1942 and 1943 to safe hiding places, finding non-Jewish families to adopt and care for them.                   

Being appalled by the conditions, she joined the underground Zegota, becoming the head of the children’s bureau. At the time, Irena was a Senior Administrator in the Warsaw, Social Welfare Department,  and managed to be issued a pass to legally enter the Ghetto; doing so daily, bringing food, medicines and clothing…5,000 people were dying per month from starvation and disease, where she decided to help the Jewish children get out.             

Child dying on street in Warsaw Ghetto

Children were taken out in gunnysacks, body bags and potato sacks; a mechanic took a baby out in his toolbox. Some were carried out in coffins, their mouth taped, or they were sedated so they wouldn’t cry. An ambulance driver accompanied by a dog took some children through the gates where they hid under the floorboard—the barking dog drowning out the children’s cries. They were given false identities and placed in homes and orphanages; and Irena wrote  down in coded form, the children’s original names and their new identities, keeping them in jars buried beneath an apple tree in a neighbor’s back yard, hoping one day she could dig them up and locate the children informing them of their past and true identities. The children only knew her by her code name, Jolanta; single handedly smuggling out 400 of them.

On October 20, 1943, the Nazis arrested Irena. She withstood torture of having both her legs and feet broken, never betraying the children or her associates. Sentenced to death, she was saved at the last minute by Zegota members who bribed a German soldier to halt the execution.                 

Reflecting on her experiences, Irena said, “Here I am, a stranger, asking them to place their child in my care. They ask if I can guarantee their safety, I have to answer, ‘No.’ Sometimes they would give me their child, other times they would say come back. I would come back a few days later and the family had already been deported.”                        

After the Polish Senate finally honored her Herculean heroism, she sent them a letter, writing, “Every child saved with my help and the help of all the wonderful secret messengers, who today are no longer living, is the justification of my existence on this Earth, and not a title to glory.” Irena Sendler died on May 12, 2008. She was 98.   

Below is an actual video of Irena Sendler describing her experience.