Written by Kylie Akins
Harding’s newest student organization, Harding Students for Life, made its debut Tuesday, Feb. 15, by highlighting the group’s dedication to the value of life with the screening of “Irena Sendler: In the Name of Their Mothers,” a film documenting the little-known story of a Polish social worker’s efforts in rescuing 2,500 Jewish children from the Warsaw Ghetto in World War II, as a benefit to the Crisis Pregnancy Center in Searcy.Harding Students for Life’s chartering this semester was actually a resurrection of a group that existed until a few years ago. Reusing the Facebook page of the former group, organization president sophomore Erin Grant said there is already interest in the group’s mission.”I’ve always had a passion for pro- life issues, but also, I really wanted to provide a way for students to be po- litically active and to integrate that into the pro-life movement as well as making students a little more aware of pro-life issues,” Grant said.Even on a predominantly pro-life campus, Grant said there is opportunity for expanding the knowledge base on all of the issues involved in the pro-life movement, including abortion, eutha- nasia, assisted suicide and embryonic stem cell research.”One of the really interesting things we found about pro-life campuses is that a lot of students have grown up being pro-life, so they don’t understand a lot of the issues just because they’ve been around it,” Grant said. “We’re hoping to explore the area a little bit more to know what they believe in and why they believe in it, instead of having a vague grasp of the issue.”The documentary shown Tuesday night stressed the group’s commit- ment to furthering the value of human life by featuring a film on Sendler, a woman who saw value in the most discriminated-against racial group in Poland during World War II.For five years, she led a group of women smuggling aid into and children out of the Jewish Warsaw ghetto serving as a starving prison to one-third of the city’s popula- tion, 400,000 Jews.The 2,500 children they were able to rescue by hiding in bundles, garbage and coffins survived the war by abandoning their Jewish identities for Christian ones while hiding in orphanages, convents and Polish homes. Though many children lost their parents to the Jewish execution camps they themselves were saved from, Sendler suffered torture and narrowly escaped execu- tion by the Gestapo to protect the rescued children’s Jewish names and parents’ names, making possible the reunions a number of families would indeed experience after the war.”As for me, it was simple,” Sendler said in the film concerning her bravery. “When someone is drowning, you give them your hand. I tried to extend my hand to the Jewish people.”The theme of the documentary stressed the value of life and its intense importance to the mission of Harding Students for Life.”I think it’s important to see [Sendler’s] example of how she valued life. She didn’t just decide, ‘Well, they’re just kids. Maybe they’ll survive,'” organization vice president junior Ashley Shelton said. “She saw kids lying in the street,see them alive one minute and the next she would come back and they would be dead. I think [this documentary] shows how we should value lives or even one life.”Grant, a business management and history double major, tied the importance of students seeing this film to her own passion for history.”[History] is really inspiring because you can look at Irena Sendler and see that she was an ordinary person who did what needed to be done in a time of need, and every one of us can do the same thing,” Grant said. “It doesn’t take someone who has been in politics for years or someone who is already well established. You just follow God’s call, and it can lead to great things.”All students are invited to join the organization, and those who are interested may contact Grant ategrant@harding.edu.
