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Sendler Saved 2,500 Jews

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The Associated Press

Published: May 13, 2008

WARSAW, Poland - Irena Sendler - credited with saving an estimated 2,500 Jewish children from the Holocaust by smuggling them out of the Warsaw Ghetto, some in baskets - died Monday in Warsaw. She was 98.

Sendler was among the first to be honored by Israel's Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial as a Righteous Among Nations for her wartime heroism.
President Lech Kaczynski expressed "great regret" over Sendler's death, calling her "extremely brave" and "an exceptional person." In recent years, Kaczynski had spearheaded a campaign to put Sendler's name forward as a candidate for the Nobel Peace Prize.

Sendler was a 29-year-old social worker with the city's welfare department when Germany invaded Poland in September 1939, launching World War II. Warsaw's Jews were forced into a walled-off ghetto.

Seeking to save the ghetto's children, Sendler masterminded risky rescue operations. Under the pretext of inspecting sanitary conditions during a typhoid outbreak, she and her assistants smuggled out babies and small children in ambulances and trams, sometimes wrapped up as packages.

Teenagers escaped by joining teams of workers forced to labor outside the ghetto. They were placed in families, orphanages, hospitals or convents.

Records show Sendler's team of about 20 people saved nearly 2,500 children from the ghetto between October 1940 and its final liquidation in April 1943, when the Nazis burned the ghetto, shooting residents or sending them to death camps.

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