A tribute to a brave and caring lady

See A well-deserved honor for a true heroine in the battle against tyranny for an introduction to Polish national heroine Irena Sendler, who helped save 2500 Jewish children during the Holocaust.

Poland's parliament and President Lech Kacyzinski recently honored Sendler and the Polish underground Council for Assisting Jews, comprised mostly of Roman Catholics risking their lives defying the Nazis. Sendler is in her 90s, and lives in Warsaw.

From a March 14, 2007, AP article by Ryan Lucas:

Sendler led about 20 helpers who smuggled Jewish children out of the Warsaw Ghetto to safety between 1940 and 1943, placing them in Polish families, convents or orphanages.

She wrote the children's names on slips of paper and buried them in jars in a neighbor's yard as a record that could help locate their parents after the war. The Nazis arrested her in 1943, but she refused — despite repeated torture — to reveal their names.

Anyone caught helping Jews in Nazi-occupied Poland risked being summarily shot, along with family members.

[...snip...]

In 1965, Israel's Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial awarded Sendler one of its first medals given to people who saved Jews, the so-called "Righteous Among the Nations."

She was given the honor in 1983, after Poland's Communist authorities finally agreed to allow her to travel abroad.

So how does the lady herself feel about the honors being given her these days? From the Lucas article:

"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," Sendler said in a letter ...

The Lucas article comes with a slide show. Sendler comes across as a beautiful woman from the inside out.