One More Name

Dr. Graham continues telling Olivia the true story of Irena Sendler, a Polish social worker who has been secretly smuggling Jewish children out of the Warsaw Ghetto during World War II, recording each child's real name, new name, and location on slips of paper hidden in two canning jars so that families can one day be reunited.

Late one night, Nazi soldiers pound on the door of the home Irena shares with her mother. Irena panics over the jars, but her mother snatches them away and hides them just before the Gestapo bursts in. The soldiers tear the house apart, breaking her mother's china, and though they find only some suspicious papers, they arrest Irena for treason and for aiding Jewish escapees. As they drag her away, her mother slips something into her hand. At Gestapo headquarters, interrogators demand the names of the people she has worked with and the children she has hidden. Irena refuses to say a word, even when she is brutally tortured.

In her prison cell, Irena meets Zofia, a writer imprisoned for exposing the horrors of the ghetto. Zofia calls her a hero, but Irena insists the opposite is true and regrets that she has done so little. She shows Zofia what her mother pressed into her hand during the arrest: a card reading "Jesus, I will trust in Thee." Olivia interrupts the story in amazement, because those very words hang on the wall of Dr. Graham's office.

Irena remains in prison for nearly four months. One cold February morning, Zofia shares a potato that the prison officers' young sons secretly dropped into prisoners' pockets. Irena marvels that a year earlier she carried potatoes into the ghetto to feed starving children, and now children are bringing them to her. She tells Zofia she has finally learned what trust means: she never had any control at all, and could only walk the path God cleared for her. Moments later a guard arrives and announces her time in prison is over. "In a way," he says. "You've been sentenced to be executed."

Meanwhile, at a convent orphanage, a man named Stefan visits Carolyn, one of the girls Irena rescued. He gently tells her that Irena was arrested and that her execution notice has been posted. Carolyn is heartbroken. "But she saved me," she whispers.

At the execution site, a soldier marches the injured Irena, whose leg is broken, away from the others and fires his gun into the air. Her friends have bribed him. He hands her a branch to use as a crutch and tells her to head south through the woods to Warsaw without getting caught. Stunned, Irena repeats the words on her card: Jesus, I will trust in Thee.

Reunited in secret with her mother, Irena learns the jars were never found: her mother hid them inside her baggy nightdress while the soldiers searched, then buried them under the neighbor's tree. Since Irena must stay hidden, a friend named Itzhak smuggles her to the farm where Stefan is staying, presenting her as a "delivery." Overjoyed to find her alive, Stefan confesses he has loved her since the day she ran into him on her bicycle and asks her to marry him. Irena tells him they must get through the war first.

Dr. Graham explains that Irena and Stefan did marry a few years after the war, though Irena suffered her whole life from her prison injuries. In all, she saved over 2,500 children. Very few were reunited with their parents, since most died in the war, but because of the jars every child learned their true name and how much their parents had loved them. Irena lived to be 98, cared for in her last years by a nurse she had once smuggled out as a baby in a toolbox. Many of "Irena's children" wrote or visited to thank her, and one visitor was Carolyn, now grown and called Ariella, who brings her own little daughter, Lillie. Ariella tells Irena she had three mothers: the one who gave birth to her, the one who adopted her, and Irena, who rescued her from the ghetto, and that through Irena she has learned to trust God again.

Then comes the story's final surprise: Dr. Graham reveals that Ariella is her own mother, and she herself is little Lillie. Irena's courage is one reason she became a doctor, to be the hands and feet of Jesus to the hurting and forgotten. Inspired, Olivia realizes God can use her talents too, and decides that Irena's story would make a wonderful play for her drama group, so that others can learn from it as well.