Mayer says he wasn’t planning on writing a book about the Holocaust, but a magazine left on his desk grabbed his interest. 

“The magazine was the December 2003 issue of Ladies Home Journal,” Mayer said, “and it was opened to an article about a woman named Irena Sendler. I don’t keep Ladies Home Journal in my waiting room. To this day I don’t know who left that article for me to find.” 

The article was called “The Woman Who Loved Children,” and it hooked Mayer with a passion to learn more. He contacted a teacher in Kansas who had worked with a group of three teenagers to uncover Sendler’s story. What they discovered was remarkable. 

Irena Sendler was a social worker who engineered the rescue of 2,500 children from the Warsaw ghetto during World War II. She was a Catholic woman, knocking on Jewish doors essentially talking mothers out of their children so she could get them to safety. 

The Kansas teens created on play about Sendler’s story, performing it more than 250 times in the U.S., Canada and Poland. Their efforts led to Sendler being nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize in 2007. 

“These teens were repairing the world by sharing Irena Sendler’s history of courage and decency in the face of extreme brutality,” Mayer said. “They began as students of history and became agents of history.” 

Mayer’s book is a work of historical fiction based on Sendler’s life and story, as well as on the Kansas teens who worked so hard to spread her belief in the need for tolerance and respect for all people. 

Mayer has pledged to donate 60% of sales of the book to the Irena Sendler/Life In a Jar Foundation, which promotes Sendler’s legacy and encourages educators and students to emulate the project by focusing on unsung heroes in history. 

Northlands’ reading instructor Emily Quinn has incorporated the book into her class. “I’ll be using Life In a Jar in conjunction with Internet research on Irena Sendler to give the students a taste of what the Kansas teens did to uncover this incredible story,” she said. 

Mayer is hopeful his book will have wide appeal. “I believe that other young people will be inspired by the amazing stories of Irena Sendler and the teens who in a very real sense rescued the rescuer.”