The Lost of a Hero

The world is blessed with thousands of heroes all over the World. They all have one thing in mind, to sacrifice themselves that others may live. And this is exactly what Irena Sendlers did. She saved some 2,500 Jewish children from the Nazi Holocaust by smuggling them out of the Warsaw Ghetto. She died at the ripe age of 98.

Below is a complete story from the Associated Press:

Polish Holocaust hero dies at age 98

By MONIKA SCISLOWSKA, Associated Press May 12, 12:35 PM ETWARSAW, Poland 

Irena Sendler — credited with saving some 2,500 Jewish children from the Nazi Holocaust by smuggling them out of the Warsaw Ghetto, some of them in baskets — died Monday, her family said. She was 98.

President Lech Kaczynski expressed “great regret” over Sendler’s death, calling her “extremely brave” and “an exceptional person.” In recent years, Kaczynski had spearheaded a campaign to put Sendler’s name forward as a candidate for the Nobel Peace Prize.

Sendler, among the first to be honored by Israel’s Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial as a Righteous Among Nations for her wartime heroism, died at a Warsaw hospital, daughter Janina Zgrzembska told The Associated Press.

Sendler was a 29-year-old social worker with the city’s welfare department when Germany invaded Poland in September 1939, launching World War II. Warsaw’s Jews were forced into a walled-off ghetto.

Seeking to save the ghetto’s children, Sendler masterminded risky rescue operations. Under the pretext of inspecting sanitary conditions during a typhoid outbreak, she and her assistants ventured inside the ghetto — and smuggled out babies and small children in ambulances and in trams, sometimes wrapped up as packages.

Teenagers escaped by joining teams of workers forced to labor outside the ghetto. They were placed in families, orphanages, hospitals or convents.

Records show that Sendler’s team of about 20 people saved nearly 2,500 children from the Warsaw Ghetto between October 1940 and its final liquidation in April 1943, when the Nazis burned the ghetto, shooting the residents or sending them to death camps.

“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,” Sendler said in 2007 in a letter to the Polish Senate after lawmakers honored her efforts in 2007.

In hopes of one day uniting the children with their families — most of whom perished in the Nazis’ death camps — Sendler wrote the children’s real names on slips of paper that she kept at home.

When German police came to arrest her in 1943, an assistant managed to hide the slips, which Sendler later buried in a jar under an apple tree in an associate’s yard. Some 2,500 names were recorded.

“It took a true miracle to save a Jewish child,” Elzbieta Ficowska, who was saved by Sendler’s team as a baby in 1942, recalled in an AP interview in 2007. “Mrs. Sendler saved not only us, but also our children and grandchildren and the generations to come.”

“I kept silent. I preferred to die than to reveal our activity,” she was quoted as saying in Anna Mieszkowska’s biography, “Mother of the Children of the Holocaust: The Story of Irena Sendler.”

In 1965, Sendler became one of the first so-called Righteous Gentiles honored by theYad Vashem Holocaust memorial in Jerusalem for wartime heroics. Poland’s communist leaders at that time would not allow her to travel to Israel; she collected the award in 1983.

Despite the Yad Vashem honor, Sendler was largely forgotten in her homeland until recent years. She came to the world’s attention in 2000 when a group of schoolgirls from Uniontown, Kan., wrote a short play about her called “Life in a Jar.”

Yad Vashem Chairman Avner Shalev said Sender’s “courageous activities rescuingJews during the Holocaust serve as a beacon of light to the world, inspiring hope and restoring faith in the innate goodness of mankind.”

Zegota, an underground organization helping Jews, paid a bribe to German guards to free her from the prison. Under a different name, she continued her work.

After World War II, Sendler worked as a social welfare official and director of vocational schools, continuing to assist some of the children she rescued.

“A great person has died — a person with a great heart, with great organizational talents, a person who always stood on the side of the weak,” Warsaw Ghetto survivor Marek Eldeman told TVN24 television.

Anyone caught helping Jews in Nazi-occupied Poland risked being summarily shot, along with family members — a fate Sendler only barely escaped herself after the 1943 raid by the Gestapo.

The Nazis took her to the notorious Pawiak prison, which few people left alive. Gestapo agents tortured her repeatedly, leaving Sendler with scars on her body — but she refused to betray her team.

There Will Always be a Sendler

Irena Sendler has now rested in peace but her memory will continue to inspire young people today. There were always be an Irena Sendler to come. At the opportune time some brave people will just do what she did, to risk her life that others may live. With all the global problems the world is experiencing today, we are still blessed with inspiring stories like this. 

 

 

Clipping the Source of Embarrassment

Had not been of electronics devices with video recording capabilities inside an operating room, there could have been no uploaded clip of a rectal procedure on the internet which elicited much controversy after thousands of You tube users had viewed it. This video clip,  had been picked up by network stations and other media and broadcasted it around the world.

The controversial video has brought embarrassment to the Department of Health and the medical community. The video which appeared in You Tube (internet video-sharing site) showed nurses and surgeons laughing and cheering while a canister was being removed from male patient’s rectum in an operating room.

Because of the extent of the moral damage it had created, particularly to the patient, the Commission of Higher Education now prohibits the use of cellphones and videocams in clinical classes. CHED chairman Romulo Neri, (a controversial personality also because of his refusal to disclose what he knows about the ZTE broadband scam controversy during the Philippine Senate’s investigation) banned medical students from bringing in these video- recording capable devices such as video cameras, mobile phones with camera features and other similar equipment in their clinical classes. The objective is to prevent similar incident to happen again in the future –uploading surgery procedure in the internet. Apart from this, medical students in the Philippines are now banned from videotaping any form of surgeries.

Neri, on his part, also explained that his order was only meant “to ensure that the integrity of all activities concerning the exercise or practice of related learning experience of nursing and other medical students are properly supervised and monitored.”

Ethical Standards in Medical Practice 

Neri’s action is just one little step to impress upon the minds of medical/nursing students the importance/ significance of observing professional ethics and discipline. With growing number of cases of medical malpractice in the Philippines now witnessed in the Philippines, the most critical and practical area of intervention is in the school. How serious are medical schools in doing their part?