holocaust heroine dies

Every child saved with my help is the justification of my existence on this Earth, and not a title to glory - Irena Sendler, 1910-2008

A Polish social worker who helped save 2,500 Jewish children from the Nazis during World War II has died from pneumonia at the age of 98.

Irena Sendler, known as the ‘female Schindler’, smuggled children out of the Warsaw Ghetto and gave them false identities, sparing them from Hitler’s Holocaust. Some of the rescued children were smuggled out disguised as wrapped parcels. Sendler and her team of 20 saved almost 2,500 children between October 1940 and April 1943, when the Nazis burned the ghetto, shooting the residents or sending them to death camps. The children they rescued were placed with families, in orphanages, hospitals and convents and spared almost certain death. In hope of one day uniting the children with their families, Sendler wrote the children’s real names on slips of paper that she kept in a jar buried underneath an apple tree in her garden.

In 1943, Irena was arrested, tortured and sentenced to death by the Gestapo. She was saved when the Council for Aid to Jews bribed the German guards taking her to her execution. Irena was left in the woods, unconscious and with broken arms and legs. She was listed on public bulletin boards as among those executed. She then went into hiding, where she continued her work for the Jewish children.

One of the children rescued by Sendler as a baby, Elzbieta Ficowska said: “She saved not only us but our children and grandchildren and the generations to come.”

What an amazing individual.