Everyone take a long look at this photo. This is the picture of a true hero.
Irena Sendler risked her life saving 2,500 Jewish children from Nazi Germany’s gas chambers. She passed on of pneumonia on May 11, 2008 in a Warsaw Poland hospital. She was aged 98.
I have always marveled at, and thus been in awe of, what the human spirit can force someone to do under extraordinarily evil situations. This lady is an example of how a good heart can triumph over one of the darkest and most sinister eras in mankind’s history.
The Nazis burned the ghetto, shooting the residents or sending them to death camps.
She went into the ghetto under the pretext of inspecting the ghetto’s sanitary conditions during a typhoid outbreak, Mrs Sendler and her assistants went inside in search of children who could be smuggled out and given a chance of survival by living as Catholics. Babies and small children were smuggled out in ambulances and in trams, sometimes wrapped up as packages.
In hopes of one day uniting the children with their families - most of whom perished in the Nazis' death camps - Sendler wrote the children's real names on slips of paper that she kept at home.
When German police came to arrest her in 1943, an assistant managed to hide the slips, which Sendler later buried in a jar under an apple tree in an associate's yard.
Some 2,500 names were recorded.
Anyone caught helping Jews in Nazi-occupied Poland risked being summarily shot, along with family members - a fate Sendler only barely escaped herself after the 1943 raid by the Gestapo.
The Nazis took her to the Pawiak prison, which few left alive. She was tortured and was left with permanent scarring on her body - but she refused to betray her team.
"I kept silent. I preferred to die than to reveal our activity," she was quoted as saying in Anna Mieszkowska's biography, "Mother of the Children of the Holocaust: The Story of Irena Sendler."
In 1965, Sendler became one of the first so-called Righteous Gentiles honored by the Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial in Jerusalem for wartime heroics.
Poland's communist leaders at that time would not allow her to travel to Israel; she collected the award in 1983.
Despite the Yad Vashem honor, Sendler was largely forgotten in her homeland.
Only in her final years, confined to a nursing home, did she finally become one of Poland's most respected figures.
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