Irene Sendler was an amazing woman. She saved over 2,500 children from Nzai concentration camps during WWII. Just remember this saying I heard today, "very rarely are the famous significant and the significant famous." Considering all the idiots who have won Nobel Peace Prizes over the years (Carter and Gore come to mind right away) and she never even got a sniff, it just shows you how meaningless some things are.
Irene Sendler, known to many as the “female Schindler”, rescued children and babies imprisoned in the Jewish ghetto in Warsaw, smuggling them out in bags, or through the sewers, and hiding them with friendly families around Warsaw.
Donning a Star of David armband used by the Nazis to mark out Jews, she passed incognito in the ghetto to organise the escape plans.
She was eventually arrested by the Gestapo, tortured and condemned to death.
But members of 20-strong secret organisation managed to bribe a guard so she could escape. She lived for another 65 years.
"She died today,” said her daughter Janina Zgrzembska, adding that Ms Sendler had passed away in a Warsaw hospital.
Last year, Miss Sendler was officially honoured as a national heroine by the Polish parliament, in a ceremony attended by some of those she had rescued.
Too frail to attend herself, she sent a letter read out by Elzbieta Ficowska, who was a six-month-old baby when she was spirited out the ghetto by Miss Sendler’s resistance group.
"Every child saved with my help is the justification of my existence on this Earth, and not a title to glory,” Miss Sendler said in the letter.
"Over a half-century has passed since the hell of the Holocaust, but its spectre still hangs over the world and doesn’t allow us to forget the tragedy.”
Miss Sendler was also honoured as a “righteous gentile” by the Israeli Holocaust Memorial Centre, Yad Vashem.
It described how between the years of 1940 and 1943 she established a network of friends and acquaintances to help some of the half million Jews forced into the Warsaw ghetto.
Using her status as a municipal welfare officer, she roamed the ghetto, ostensibly to combat contagious diseases.
While she was there however, she also handed out money, clothes and medicines.
Then, slipping on a Star of David armband, she formulated extraordinary schemes to spirit children to safety.
Some were carried out in bags, others were sent crawling through the network of sewers common to the ghetto and the rest of Warsaw.
Once successfully out, Ms Sendler farmed the children out to Warsaw families, orphanages or convents, where they were hidden.
For each success, Miss Sendler buried a jar containing the child’s name, to help families reunite after the war.
Some 400,000 she could not help died, however, either through disease in the ghetto or at the death camps where in total three million Polish Jews perished.
