Columbus, Kan. ? A poem Nick Thomas wrote when he was 9 years old began a journey that will take him to the East Coast this summer and possibly to Poland.

“I wrote a poem about the Holocaust and the children of the Holocaust called ‘Remember the Children,'” he said.

He entered his work in a poetry contest and won.

Now 11 years old and a sixth grader at Central School in Columbus, that poem has helped to earn him a spot in an inspirational program based on the life of a young woman who risked her life to save thousands of others from the Warsaw ghetto.

Thomas’ grandmother provided a copy of the poem to a group of students from Uniontown High School, west of Fort Scott, who produced a play about the life of Irena Sendler and were traveling to Warsaw, Poland, to meet her.

Sendler, who is now 93, smuggled 2,500 Jewish children out of the Warsaw ghetto in 1942 and 1943 to save them from certain death at the hands of the Nazis. The Uniontown students presented the copy of Thomas’ poem to her.

“Thank you very much for sending me so beautiful and touching poem,” Sendler wrote back to him. “I am impressed because it shows how sensitive you are on someone else’s suffering and harm. You have such a good heart!”

Uncovering history

A Catholic social worker with access to the ghetto, Sendler persuaded Jewish parents in the ghetto to surrender their children to save them from death. She kept the names of the children in jars, which she buried under an apple tree in a friend’s garden. The Gestapo captured her, breaking her feet and legs. Her friends bribed a guard to release her when she was scheduled to be killed.

After the war, her story nearly forgotten, Sendler faded into obscurity and poverty.

Then, in 1999, the Uniontown students began searching for a topic for a history day project. Their adviser, social studies teacher Norm Conard, stumbled upon Sendler’s name and suggested her story.

¢ www.irenasendler.com

The result was “Life in a Jar.” The play won the National History Day competition that year, but that was only the beginning. The students have performed the play nearly 100 times and have been featured in USA Today, on CNN and National Public Radio.

“The students have been given credit for rescuing her story for the world,” Conard said.

With funds raised from performances of “Life in a Jar,” the students established the Irena Sendler Project. The money supplements Sendler’s meager pension and has allowed her to move into a small apartment with her own telephone and bathroom.

Their performances have taken them to Poland twice, where they have met Sendler.

‘A normal kid’

When there was an opening in the cast for the role of a Jewish orphan child, Conard thought of Thomas and the poem he had written.

Thomas joined the cast in time for a presentation last August in Kansas City.

“I had one practice before my first performance,” he said.

He calls his character “a normal kid living out on the street” who represents all the Jewish orphans in the ghetto. It was orphan children like the one he plays that Sendler smuggled out of the ghetto first, because she didn’t have to deal with parents unwilling to surrender the children.

Thomas has performed the play 15 times since August and said that audiences were always receptive.

“They’ll thank us for coming and have tears in their eyes,” he said. “It touches a lot of people, really.”

He said it was common for audience members to cry during the play. His mother, Bobbi Thomas, confirmed that.

“I cry every time I see it,” she said. “I think the closer you get to the story, the greater the impact it has on you.”

“Life in a Jar” was presented recently in Topeka. In June, the cast will travel to West Virginia, Michigan, New York City and Connecticut. Conard said he was scheduling performance dates for 2004.

Plans for a European tour have not been announced this year. If there is a European tour, Thomas will meet the subject of the play.

“She loves Kansas,” Bobbi Thomas said of Sendler. “She loves sunflowers.”