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My name is Megan Stewart. When I was a high school student in Kansas in 1999, our history teacher encouraged four of us to work on a year—long National History Day project. We accepted the challenge. Our teacher showed us a short article from a March 1994 issue of US News and World Report. It said, “Irena Sendler saved 2,500 children from the Warsaw Ghetto in 1942-43.” Our teacher told us that the article might be a mistake, since he had heard of no one who had helped that many people. We got interested and decided to look into this.
We gradually came to learn a lot about Irena Sendler and how she tried to save Jewish children. We were very much impressed that she made lists of the children’s names and buried them in jars in a garden.
We decided that we should make Irena Sendler’s story into a play so that many people could learn about her. We began to describe Irena Sendler’s life and wrote a play called Life in a Jar. We first performed it in a local church. To our surprise, we received great encouragement from the audience. We next performed on National History Day and won first prize!
We then started to perform the play for many more people around the state of Kansas, all over North America, and in Europe! We are really proud and happy that people now know more about Irena Sendler.