15 March 2007
Poland's Senate has honored Irena Sendler, 97, who saved around 2,500 Jewish children from the Nazis, and also the World War II underground Polish Council for Assisting Jews, Zegota. Sendler and her fellow resistance fighters were symbols for solidarity and human kindness, Senate speaker Bogdan Boruszewicz pointed out. Poland's president Lech Kaczynski said Sendler was a hero who deserved the Nobel Peace Prize, for which she has been nominated by the Polish government.
During World War II, Sendler - a trained nurse - helped children to escape from Warsaw's Jewish ghetto. She hid them in boxes under tram seats or anesthesized them in order to get them out of the ghetto in an ambulance as "dead typhoid victims". She then found the children new homes and foster parents, while hiding their true identities on papers which she hid in glasses buried in her garden.
In 1943, Irena Sendler was caught by the Nazi police, tortured and sentenced to death. At the last moment, Zegota members rescued her. In 1965, the Israeli Holocaust Memorial Yad Vashem named her as 'Righteous Among the Nations'. Sendler, who lives in a nursing home in Warsaw, was too frail to attend the special session in which members of the Senate unanimously approved a resolution honoring her and the Zegota members (mostly Catholics like Sendler) who risked their lives. "Every child saved with my help and the help of all the wonderful secret messengers, who today are no longer living, is the justification of my existence on this earth, and not a title to glory. Over half a century has passed since the hell of the Holocaust, but its specter still hangs over the world and does not allow us to forget the tragedy." Sendler said in a letter read by Elzbieta Ficowska, who was saved by her as a baby.
