Irena Sendler, a Catholic Polish woman who smuggled thousands of Jewish children to safety from the Warsaw Ghetto, has died in Warsaw aged 98. Sendler was arrested and tortured by the Nazi Gestapo after her activities were discovered. Between October 1940 and April 1943, Sendler and a group of about 20 volunteers smuggled about 2,500 children out in boxes or suitcases. The children were then placed with Polish families. As a social worker, Sendler had regular access to the Jewish ghetto in Warsaw, in which around 450,000 people, a third of Warsaw's population, were crammed after Nazi Germany's invasion of Poland in 1939.
"She was the inspiration and the prime mover for the whole network that saved those 2,500 Jewish children," Deborah Dwork, the Rose professor of Holocaust history at Clark University in Massachusetts, told the New York Times. According to Dwork's research, about 400 children had been directly smuggled out of the ghetto by Irena Sendler via secret underground corridors.
In 1965, Sendler was among the first people named by Yad Vashem as Righteous Among the Nations. She also was made an honorary Israeli citizen. Sendler was also nominated last year for the Nobel Peace Prize. Eight years ago, a group of students from Uniontown, Kansas, turned her wartime heroism into a play that has since been performed in North America and Poland:
World Jewish Congress president Ronald S. Lauder said in a statement: "Irena Sendler was a heroine and a truly remarkable woman. Her courage and strength helped thousands of Jewish children to survive the Nazi onslaught. The Jewish people owe her an enormous debt of gratitude, and we will never forget this truly exceptional woman."