KEY POINTS:
Irena Sendler, a Polish woman who smuggled thousands of children out of the Warsaw Ghetto, saving them from certain death at the hands of the Nazis, has died at the age of 98.
As a social worker, she had neither the financial might nor the contact book of
Oskar Schindler, to whom she is inevitably compared, yet she rescued almost double the number of children, about 2500 in total. The tricks of her trade were not elaborate: tool boxes, trolleys, suitcases and old sewer pipes were used to smuggle Jewish babies and toddlers out of the ghetto, undetected by the Nazis.
"Her courageous activities ... serve as a beacon of light to the world, inspiring hope and restoring faith in the innate goodness of mankind," said Avner Shalev, the chairman of Israel's Holocaust memorial centre, Yad Vashem.
Officially recognised as a national hero by the Polish Parliament last year as well as being nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize, Sendler only belatedly received the acclaim she deserved, living in relative obscurity until a decade ago.
That her story was almost forgotten was in part the legacy of the anti-Semitism fostered by Poland's postwar communist regime, and in part her own modesty.
"I continue to have qualms of conscience that I did so little," she said at the nursing home in Warsaw where she spent her twilight years.
"There's no other word for it apart from heroism," said Elzbieta Ficowska, one of the children spirited out of the ghetto. "The survival instinct is to save ourselves but she saved others."
The Warsaw Ghetto, surrounded by 3m walls topped with broken glass, was established by the Nazis to pen the city's Jewish population pending deportation to concentration and extermination camps.
Sendler was tortured by the Gestapo and would have been killed had her colleagues not managed to bribe Nazi officers. Although the German authorities plastered Warsaw with posters, announcing that Sendler had died by firing squad, she was in fact dumped in the woods, her arms and legs broken and unconscious, but alive.
- INDEPENDENT