After some intense research the other day, I ran across this Story that uplifted my heart. You see, even in times of doom and gloom, death and Nazi's, there are beautiful people who are Angels of Hope.

I'd like to share one such story with you. Prairyearth
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Irena Sendler: WWII Rescuer and Hero
by Peter K. Gessner

Irena Sendler was born in 1910. Her father was a socialist and a doctor in Otwock, a town some 15 miles southeast of Warsaw. Most of his patients were Jewish.

In October 1942, when in German-occupied Poland the Council for Aid to Jews - codename "Zegota" - was organized by the Polish Underground, Sendler was one of its first recruits. Thirty-two years old, she was at the time a Senior Administrator in the Warsaw Welfare Department. She had already been very involved in helping Jews before the Germans set up the Jewish Ghetto. She became the director of the Children’s Section of Zegota using the codename: Jolanta.

Sendler had already been helping Jews well before becoming the founding of Zegota. Her Welfare Department operated canteens for orphans, poor people and the destitute in every district of the city. Jews, whose bank accounts, real estate and property had been quickly confiscated by the Germans, found themselves among the ranks of the poor, yet by German edict were denied all forms of assistance. Sendler, having recruited at least one co-worker, or more correctly, co-conspirator from each of the ten centers of the Welfare Department, strove to find ways to circumvent the German edicts. Jewish families were registered under fictitious Christian names, were registered for short periods a tenants and to prevent inspections, their families were reported as being afflicted with such highly infectious diseases as typhus and tuberculosis. When the Ghetto was sealed, however, 90% of the 3000 Jews that were being helped through her efforts, ended up behind its walls.

To be able to enter the Ghetto, she managed to obtain for herself and her co-conspirator, Irena Schultz, official passes from doctors in Warsaw’s Epidemic Control Department that allowed them to legally entre the Ghetto. They visited the Ghetto daily, reestablished contacts and brought themselves or arrange for others to bring to the Ghetto food, medicines, money and clothing. However, given the terrible conditions in the Ghetto, where 5,000 people were dying a month from starvation and disease, the two decided to help people, particularly children, to get out of the Ghetto. This was no easy task. Moreover it got more difficult as time went on and the Germans sealed the various avenues - underground passages, holes in the Ghetto wall, etc. - that were used in the process. Some guards could be bribed, and children could and sometimes were thrown over the Ghetto wall.

For Sendler, a young mother herself, persuading parents to part with their children was in itself a horrendous task. Finding families on the Christian - so called Aryan side - willing to shelter the children, and thereby willing to risk being executed if the Germans ever found out, was also not easy. As a rule, the children were first placed in a temporary shelter, then to a foster home after they had somewhat recovered from their period of destitution. There was also a need to wait for them to receive from the Polish Underground false identity papers that were good enough to pass German muster. Each child had to be provided with a factitious birth and baptismal certificate and a family history of parents, siblings, aunts and uncles, etc. which the children, if old enough, had to commit to memory. Sendler carefully noted, in coded form, the children’s original names and their new identities and buried the information in glass jars in a garden so that at some point in the future they could be returned to their parents, or at least know who they had been. In all Sendler, her jars contained the names of 2,500 children.

On October 20, 1943 Sendler was arrested by the Gestapo. Although subjected to beatings and torture during which both of her feet and legs were broken, but not her spirit: she revealed nothing. Never again would she be able to walk without crutches. Sentenced to death, she was rescued by Zegota which, fearful that she would break down and reveal the location of the children, managed to bribe a guard to check off her name on a list of those already executed. As a result, she was listed on public bulletin boards as among those on whom a sentence of death had been carried out.

Rescued, she had to assume a completely new identity and liver an entirely new life. She could not visit her dying mother, nor attend her funeral. But she did again become deeply involved in the work of Zegota and after the war was able to give the children’s who’s who identify information to the Central Committee of Polish Jews.

In the post-war period she again immersed herself in the area of Social Welfare, working in the Ministry of Health. Having been in the Polish Underground was not looked upon with favor by Poland’s communist masters. Though she was never arrested by the Communist authorities, she was threatened that her children was not be allowed to have access to higher education.

In 1965 she accorded the title of Righteous Among the Nations by the Yad Vashem organization in Jerusalem and in 1991 she was made an honorary citizen of Israel. Interviewed in 1995 on camera in a 40-minute French documentary by Polish-born writer and film-maker Marek Halter, Sendler, her squinty, blue eyes awash with tears, recounted how she smuggled Jewish children out of the Warsaw Ghetto in an ambulance. In the front seat, a dog barked loudly to drown out the cries of her small passengers. Still visited by some of Jews she saved, ``I could have done more,'' she said. ``This regret will follow me to my death.''

Now 91 years old and confined to a wheelchair she continues to live in Warsaw where in May, 2001 she was visited by a group of four high school students from a rural school in Uniontown, Kansas. The students, accompanied by their parents and history teacher, came to meet the person whose life story inspired then to create a prize-winning dramatic presentation "Life in a Jar." The presentation, seen in many venues in the United States and popularized by National Public Radio, C-SPAN and CBS has brought Sendlers story of great courage and dedication to a wider public.

From; http://info-poland.buffalo.edu/classroom/sendler/index.html

And, a few more facts below from; http://www.irenasendler.org/team.asp

Irena Sendlerowa - Courage and valor
Irena Sendler, born in 1910, was raised by her Catholic parents to respect and love people regardless of their ethnicity or social status. Her father, a physician, died from typhus that he contracted during an epidemic in 1917. He was the only doctor in his town near Warsaw who would treat the poor, mostly Jewish victims of this tragic disease. As he was dying, he told 7-year-old Irena, “If you see someone drowning you must try to rescue them, even if you cannot swim.” In 1939 the Nazis swept through Poland and imprisoned the Jews in ghettos where they were first starved to death and then systematically murdered in killing camps. Irena, by than a social worker in Warsaw, saw the Jewish people drowning and resolved to do what she could to rescue as many as possible, especially the children. Working with a network of other social workers and brave Poles, mostly women, she smuggled 2,500 children out of the Warsaw ghetto and hid them safely until the end of the war. Sendler took great risks – obtaining forged papers for the children, disguising herself as an infection control nurse, diverting German occupation funds for the support of children in hiding. She entered the Warsaw ghetto, sometimes two and three times a day, and talked Jewish parents into giving up their children. Sendler drugged the babies with sedatives and smuggled them past Nazi guards in gunny sacks, boxes and coffins. She helped the older ones escape through the sewers, through secret openings in the wall, through the courthouse, through churches, any clever way she and her network could evade the Nazis. Once outside the ghetto walls, Sendler gave the children false names and documents and placed them in convents, orphanages and with Polish families. In 1942 the Polish underground organization ZEGOTA recruited her to lead their Children’s Division, providing her with money and support. Her hope was that after the war she could reunite the children with surviving relatives, or at least return their Jewish identities. To that end she kept thin tissue paper lists of each child’s Jewish name, their Polish name and address. She hid the precious lists in glass jars buried under an apple tree in the back yard of one of her co-conspirators. In 1943 Irena Sendler was arrested, tortured and sentenced to death by firing squad. She never divulged the location of the lists or her Polish underground contacts. At the last moment she was saved by ZEGOTA which bribed a guard to secure her freedom. She still bears the scars and disability of her torture. After the war, the Communist government suppressed any recognition of the courageous anti-fascist partisans, most of whom were also anti-Communists. Irena’s story and those of other courageous Poles, were buried and forgotten. Her courage and resourcefulness were recognized by Israel in 1965 when she was awarded the Yad Vashem medal given to Righteous Gentiles who risked their own lives to save Jews during the Holocaust. In 1983 a tree was planted in her honor in Israel. But in general, the world was silent about Irena Sendler. Silence until 1999, when three Kansas teens uncovered Irena’s story. Liz Cambers, Megan Stewart, and Sabrina Coons (a fourth, Jessica Shelton, joined later), students at rural Uniontown High School were looking for a National History Day project. Their teacher, Norm Conard gave them a short paragraph about Irena Sendler from a 1994 U.S. News and World Report story entitled “The Other Schindlers” and they decided to research her life. According to the article, Irena Sendler smuggled 2,500 Jewish children out of the Warsaw ghetto just prior to its liquidation in 1943. (An internet search turned up only one web site that mentioned Irena Sendler. Now there are over 80,000.) With the help and inspiration of their teacher, they began to reconstruct the remarkable achievements of this forgotten hero of the Holocaust. The three Kansas girls assumed Irena Sendler must be dead and searched for her burial site. To their surprise and delight, they discovered that she was still alive, 90-years-old, living with relatives in a small apartment in Warsaw. They created a play about her rescue efforts called Life in a Jar, which has since been performed more than 200 times in the U.S., Canada and Poland. In May 2001 they visited Irena in Warsaw and began a friendship that has inspired other Polish Righteous Gentiles to break their silence. Irena is now a Polish national hero and Poland is coming to terms with the painful legacy of the war and the Holocaust.