Irena Sendler

Irena Sendler was a 29-year-old Polish Catholic social worker with a municipal welfare office that gave her legitimate access to the Warsaw Ghetto. Beginning in 1940, she and a network of roughly 30 women smuggled Jewish children out of the ghetto through every conceivable method: in ambulances with false compartments, through a court building whose basement connected to the ghetto, in body bags and coffins, and even with a trained dog whose barking concealed the cries of infants.\n\nEach rescued child's real name was written on thin strips of tissue paper, along with the name of the Polish family who agreed to shelter them. These paper strips were buried in two glass jars beneath an apple tree in a friend's garden at 90 Grojecka Street, Warsaw.\n\nIn October 1943, the Gestapo arrested Sendler. They broke her legs and feet with an axe handle during interrogation, demanding the names of her network and the children. She refused to reveal anything. Sentenced to death, she escaped execution when a guard — bribed by the underground Żegota organization — helped her flee. She lived in hiding for the rest of the war.\n\nAfter the war, she dug up the jars and spent years trying to place each child with surviving relatives. Most parents were dead, murdered at Treblinka. Most of the families who hid them were killed during the Warsaw Uprising or died in random reprisals.\n\nHer story remained largely unknown until 1999, when a group of schoolchildren from Uniontown, Kansas, researching her for a National History Day project, uncovered the story. She was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize in 2007. She died on May 12, 2008, at age 98. On her gravestone, in Hebrew and Polish: "The one who saved 10,000 lives and never lost hope."