Righteous Among the Nations is an honorary title awarded to people who helped save Jews during the Holocaust. Approximately 28,000 people hold this title. One of them was the Polish woman Irena Sendler.
When the Nazis created the Warsaw Ghetto in 1940, Irena was 30 years old. Working as a social worker, she visited the ghetto to monitor sanitary and epidemiological conditions. She would sneak in food and do what she could to ease the plight of the residents. But most importantly, Irena Sendler and her like-minded colleagues managed to smuggle a huge number of Jewish children out and hide them in "Aryan" territory. They were provided with forged documents and placed in foster families and Polish orphanages.
The exact number of these children is unknown. The figure of 2,500 is often cited in the press, but Irena herself never stated this and, when asked, would always reply that she had saved too few. Some families were not ready to give up their children; others had children who did not speak Polish at all and only spoke Yiddish.
Irena Sendler kept an archive, which consisted of a bottle buried in a yard, containing records of the children's real and assumed names along with the details of their new guardians. The archive survived, and after the war, many of the children were found, although, of course, they had nowhere to return to. Nearly half a million people were forced into the Warsaw Ghetto; the vast majority were deported to death camps or died in the ghetto itself from hunger, disease, executions, or during the uprising.
Naturally, everyone involved in saving the children risked their own lives, and Irena was eventually caught by the Gestapo due to a denunciation. She was tortured in custody, yet she did not betray any of her comrades. She was sentenced to death, but a Jewish underground organization managed to bribe the executioners, who only staged her execution, giving her the opportunity to escape.
Irena Sendler remained in hiding until the end of the war, and subsequently lived a long and difficult life, marked by the loss of her own children. She died in Warsaw at the age of 98.
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