Berthe Sendzimir

Berthe Sendzimir was born 1913 in Paris as Berthe Madeline Bernoda. In 1935 she first met Tadeusz Sendzimir at Armco's Paris office where she worked as the director's secretary. Five years later, when they met again, both as exiled Europeans at Armco's headquarters in Middletown, Ohio, they fell in love and got married. For the following 40 years Ms. Sendzimir supported Tadeusz Sendzimir until his death by giving him her invaluable advice concerning all business issues and personal matters, raising their three children and running the household, so he could concentrate on his inventions. In later years he would admit, "I couldn't have done what I did without you." After his death she became CEO of Sencor, the research and developing company of Tadeusz Sendzimir. Ms. Sendzimir died in 1994, five years after her husband. Before her death she set in motion what she and Tadeusz had started discussing back in 1985, the year that the truth about Poland's environmental degradation began to reach the world. The shock and outrage of those revelations had eventually converged on their determination to leave a legacy that would help restore Poland in the years to come.

Berthe felt that the steel industry not only contributed greatly to the development of our modern world but also caused a number of serious environmental problems. She wanted to counterbalance these negative effects by setting up the Sendzimir Foundation which is dedicated to help people in Poland and other East European Countries to find solutions on how to clean up the environment from previous methods of productions and to find solutions how to live in a sustainable manner.