Janine Dawidowicz: Helpful Entrance Of Being Thankful

Thankful is a word not everyone truly understands. Being thankful is knowing all the small things your parents do for you, saying thank you, and meaning it, and understanding the value of anything and everything. All the following people have either developed a sense of gratitude for life or has helped other achieve it. We should use their stories to help us have more empathy towards others and how they appreciate the small things in life.
Janine Dawidowicz was nine years old when her family was first pushed to Warsaw from Kalisz, Poland. She lived in the ghetto for 2 years until she escaped in the winter of 1942. Her father was on the Jewish Police Force and her mother was attending finishing school when the war started. During her time there,
In an interview with Time Magazine she says, "When you are drowning, and you see a straw, you hang onto the straw. Is the straw going to save you? No, but the touch of hope may." She grew up in Warsaw before the Holocaust and was moved to the confines of the ghetto. She lived in her uncle's home and on the streets, you could see people dead and/or sleeping on the streets. "People were starving and it was winter, and people were dying. Every morning that you were able to go out, you saw corpses. Not even covered with newspapers, because there wasn’t enough time to do it, this is how many people were gone. How can one forget this?" After word was spread around that the inhabitants of the ghetto were being sent to death camps and being killed, their family started digging a hole with their hands in the hopes of being able to live there safely and not get killed. While hiding, they found out about an uprising going on above them. The uprising continued for a few more weeks until the Nazis came to take them away. "At this point we had two choices. One was to remain there, and the ghetto was in flames already. The houses were burning in the ghetto. Life is a very precious thing and we said, well, either we go, or we burn right here. We went out." Her family was split up, her mother, father, and little brother slaughtered on the spot, Sonia and her sister were sent to Auschwitz-Birkenau. After the she told herself that she
She started working as a Polish social worker in the health department and was sent to work in Warsaw during the war. While there, she met families with children ranging in age from newborn to adult. Along with some colleagues, and members of a Polish Jew protection service (Zegota), they rescued several children, giving them false papers. They smuggled them out in suitcases, ambulances, sewer pipes, and whatever way they could think of. Once they were out, Irena would write their name and where they went on a slip of paper twice. She placed the papers in a jar and buried it in her colleague's garden. Most of the parents did not survive the Holocaust and died at Treblinka Extermination Camp, but those who lived were reunited with their children. October 1943 she was caught and arrested by the Gestapo. The Zegota convinced/bribed the German police to drop the charges. Elzibieta Ficowska was rescued by Irena when she was only five months old. She says "In the face of today’s indifference, the example of Irena Sendlerowa is very important. Irena Sendlerowa is like a third mother to me and many rescued children." In 2007 she was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize but lost to Al Gore with a book on global warming. She passed away May 12, 2008 of a long lasting disease. (Holocaust Eduacation & Archive Reasearch Team).(United States Holocaust Memorial