2008 Nobel Prize nominee, Irena Sendler, saved 2500 children from the Warsaw Ghetto during World War II. Based on a true story.

Irena Sendler is a Catholic social worker who has sympathized with the Jews since her childhood, when her physician father died of typhus contracted while treating poor Jewish patients. When she initially proposes saving Jewish children from the Warsaw Ghetto, her idea is met with skepticism by fellow workers, her parish priest, and even her own mother Janina.

Für Irena zooms in on the last few years of an extraordinary woman, Lithuanian theatre scholar, Germanist professor and Holocaust survivor Irena Veisaite. “Never take revenge,” Irena’s mother told her before she was executed by the Nazis. These words kept Irena from feeling blind hatred even in her darkest hour. Born in 1928, Irena barely escaped perishing in the Kaunas ghetto. She was taken into the Christian family of a Lithuanian woman who had six children of her own. After the Soviets occupied the country, the woman was deported to Siberia. Losing her two mothers – one Jewish, killed by the Nazis, the other Catholic, sent to the Soviet Gulag – made a huge impact on Irena. In the secret ghetto school, Irena read Schiller’s Ballads, and after the war, she decided to study German literature. As a survivor of two totalitarian regimes, Irena dedicated her whole life to resolving conflicts between people and cultures, and healing trauma in society.

On the verge of her 90th birthday, a grandmother reveals to her grandson the painful story of her sister's disappearance during the Holocaust and the survivor's guilt she carries.