Jack Mayer Author Visit
Jack Mayer then shared the story of Irene Sendler, an incredible woman who defied the Nazis and saved 2,500 Jewish children by smuggling them out of the Warsaw Ghetto. As a health worker, Irene smuggled the children out between 1942 and 1943 to safe hiding places and found non-Jewish families to adopt them. This unsung heroine passed away on Monday, May 12, 2008.
Irena Sendler’s achievement went largely unnoticed for many years. Then the story was uncovered by four young students at Uniontown High School, in Kansas, who were the winners of the 2000 Kansas state National History Day competition by writing a play Life in a Jar about the heroic actions of Irena Sendler. The girls - Elizabeth Cambers, Megan Stewart, Sabrina Coons and Janice Underwood - have since gained international recognition, along with their teacher, Norman Conard. The presentation, seen in many venues in the United States and popularized by National Public Radio, C-SPAN and CBS, has brought Irena Sendler’s story to a wider public.
Jack Mayer is a pediatrician and a writer. He began practicing pediatrics in 1976 in Enosburg Falls, Vermont, a small town in eastern Franklin County on the Canadian border. From 1987 – 1991 Dr. Mayer was a National Cancer Institute Fellow at Columbia University School of Public Health in New York City, researching the molecular biology of childhood cancer. Most of his scientific writing was done during those four years. He was also an academic pediatrician at Columbia University’s Presbyterian Medical Center. Dr. Mayer returned to Vermont in 1991 and established Rainbow Pediatrics in Middlebury, Vermont, where he continues to practice primary care pediatrics. He is an Instructor in Pediatrics at the University of Vermont School of Medicine and an advisor for pre-medical students at Middlebury College. Throughout his career, Dr. Mayer has written short stories, poems, and essays about his years in pediatric practice and hiking The Long Trail in Vermont. He was a participant at Middlebury College’s Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference in 2003 and 2005 for fiction, and in 2008 for poetry.