A petite Polish woman credited with saving 2500 Jewish children’s lives from the Nazi’s Holocaust died May 12 at the age of 98.  Smuggling babies and young Jews out of the Warsaw Ghetto during a 30 month period, Irena Sendler led a small group of courageous Poles that risked their own life to save the doomed children once Hitler invaded Poland in October, 1939.  “The whole of Poland was drowning in blood, but the Jewish nation was suffering the most, with the Jewish children the most vulnerable,” she recalled in an interview a few years ago. 

In the midst of war, and rampant anti-Semitism, Sendler’s values taught to her by her family still caused her to respect the dignity of the innocent and vulnerable.  Eventually, her efforts were discovered and she was imprisoned and sentenced to be executed.  Friends bribed a Gestapo guard the day she was scheduled to die, and she lived in hiding until the end of the war.

Israel’s Yad Veshem, the Holocaust Martyrs’ and Heroes’ Remembrance Authority, honored Sendler in 1965 as one of the first to receive their highest honor as a Righteous Gentile.  For decades the Communists ignored Sendler’s heroism.  Her actions finally received public recognition in recent years culminating in a nomination for a Noble Prize in 2006. 

Humble and principled to the end, Sendler said in 2007, “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.”

May the principled life of sacrifice and service be an example to us all to defend the right to life for all people, especially the most defenseless.