"I'm generally not drawn to projects that work only on a surface level," she added. "And a topic that unfortunately always seems timely is prejudice. As a species we haven't overcome it, obviously. It keeps on needing to be addressed, in different ways — in everything from light fantasy to serious drama."When her agent sent her Harrison's screenplay of "The Courageous Heart of Irena Sendler," she was on vacation with Moyer in London last October: "I read it in about an hour on his iPhone, just staring at the screen with my mouth open," she recalled. "I couldn't quite believe she was actually a real person. I was just absolutely fascinated and in awe at how someone so young could be so strong in such a terrifying period of time. And I said, 'OK, where do I sign up?" Harrison sent Paquin a rough translation of Anna Mieszkowska's "Mother of the Children of the Holocaust: The Story of Irena Sendler," a biography that had been published only in Polish, German and Hebrew, but has not yet come out in English. She "rapidly tore through" it and spent the following two weeks watching movies and reading books on the period: "What I found most powerful and helpful was a book titled 'Words to Outlive Us: Eyewitness Accounts From the Warsaw Ghetto,' which is composed of journal and diary entries," Paquin recalled. "I read about how guards would torture prisoners in front of others to scare them — really horrendous things like tying people up and letting dogs half-eat them; or the sort of ease with which people would be randomly shot. Those eyewitness accounts were as close as I could get to Irena's world — and what came through strongly was just how absolutely terrified and out of control people felt." Sendler's sympathy for the Jewish plight began when she was growing up in and around Warsaw. Her father was the only physician in their town of Otwock willing to treat Jewish patients during a typhoid epidemic; he himself caught the disease and died in 1917, when Irena was 7. Sendler followed his heroic example after Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto were sealed off from the rest of the city by 10-foot-high walls. In 1942, she gathered a network of fellow social workers and volunteers — all sympathetic Polish Catholics — and began her operation to save children under the auspices of Zegota, a code name for the Council for Aid to Jews, a program of the Polish government in exile. The social workers were mostly female, which proved helpful because a woman could more easily walk past officials holding the hand of a Jewish child as if he or she were her own, often through corridors of a courthouse leading out of the ghetto to the Aryan side of the city. After the children were ensconced in temporary housing, they were drilled in Catholic songs and prayers, their black hair was bleached blond and some boys were dressed as girls to trick the Gestapo out of checking to see whether they had been circumcised. The lucky ones received Catholic papers and were placed in a convent, an orphanage or with other rescuers for the duration of the war. One mother tearfully handed over her infant, Elzbieta Ficowska, who was drugged, placed in a box with a silver spoon and hidden in a truck hauling bricks out of the ghetto; the scene is recreated in the film. Because Sendler hoped to eventually reunite the children with their parents, she scribbled each one's name and location on scraps of paper and placed the notes in jars which she buried under an apple tree in an associate's yard in Warsaw. In 1943, the owner of a laundry that served as a safe house betrayed Sendler under torture. On Oct. 20 of that year, Gestapo agents arrested Sendler, tortured her for three months in the infamous Pawiak Prison and then sentenced her to death. Just before her execution, however, an officer bribed by Zegota arranged for her name to appear on a list of prisoners who had already been executed. Sendler escaped, and until the end of the war she continued to help children while living in hiding. Twenty years later, she became one of the first "Righteous Gentiles" to be honored by Yad Vashem. She saved twice the number of Jews as Oskar Schindler, the inspiration for "Schindler's List." In Poland, however, the anti-Semitic communist regime was unimpressed by Sendler's wartime deeds. She remained in obscurity until 1999, when a group of Kansas high school students came across a short article on her in a 1994 issue of U.S. News & World Report and decided to turn her story into a history project. Because they assumed Sendler had died, the students contacted the Jewish Foundation for the Righteous to locate her grave. Instead they learned she was still living in Warsaw, though ailing and in a wheelchair. The students promptly wrote her a letter, and thus began a friendship that would lead to an interactive play "Life in a Jar," which the students performed all over the world, making international headlines. They also eventually visited the elderly rescuer. Harrison wasn't so lucky; while writing his script in Warsaw last year, he had set up an interview with the 98-year-old social worker, but their meeting was canceled when Sendler was hospitalized with pneumonia; she died on May 12, 2008. Harrison attended the funeral at the Powazki cemetery and watched as Jewish community leaders, survivors, Polish ministers and the Israeli ambassador to Poland turned out to pay their last respects. A rabbi recited the Kaddish, Catholics chanted Christian prayers and Chopin's "Funeral March" was played during the burial. Back at the Venice cafĂ©, Paquin put down her cup of coffee and looked shocked when asked whether actors seek roles in Holocaust-themed films in order to win awards, as charged by The New York Times last year. "That's not what I find interesting about this kind of work. What is interesting is the chance to portray a strong, powerful woman, because there is such a dearth of such roles. Actresses often end up playing 'the girlfriend' or the sex object; I love getting to be a part of a story that has nothing to do with that," she said. Even so, when Paquin set off for the three-week shoot in Riga, Latvia, last winter, she did so with trepidation. "I spent the first week terrified that I wasn't doing a good enough job, because how could you possibly feel [the pain and fear] enough," she said. "But after a while you have to forgive yourself for not knowing what it's like to be tortured, and just do the best you can." To play Sendler, Paquin at times accessed some of her own feelings about her sister's recent surgery; the 30-year-old Katya has had three operations so far for a brain tumor.
"It's that feeling of powerlessness, but at the same time having to buck up and be strong for somebody, because if you're scared, it doesn't even compare to how scared they are," the actress said. To play Irena you don't get to cry, you don't get to show that you're frightened. You have to be strong for the children and their parents, and I found that very empowering," she said. For Irena, being frightened of her own death was not the worst thing in the world. Far worse was the dilemma of the parents trying to decide whether to stay with their children or let them go — an almost impossible choice.""The Courageous Heart of Irena Sendler" airs Sunday, April 19, 2009 at 9PM ET/ 8PM CT on CBS. SOURCE: The JewishJournal.com: A Righteous Role (Photo credits: Hallmark Hall of Fame, HBO Inc., and The JewishJournal.com)
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