From the Associated Press:
Irena Sendler saved nearly 2,500 Jewish children from the Nazis, organizing a ring of 20 Poles to smuggle them out of the Warsaw Ghetto in baskets and ambulances.
The Nazis arrested her, but she didn’t talk under torture. After she survived the war, she expressed regret for doing too little.
Lawmakers in Poland’s Senate disagreed Wednesday, unanimously passing a resolution honoring her and the Polish underground’s Council for Assisting Jews, of which her ring of mostly Roman Catholics was a part.
Poland’s goverment-in-exile set up the secret organization in 1942 to help save Jews from the Nazi-established ghettoes and labor camps.
Anyone caught helping Jews in Nazi-occupied Poland risked being summarily shot, along with family members…
After smuggling the children out of the ghetto and placing them with non-Jewish families, Sendler wrote their names on slips of paper and buried them in jars in a neighbor’s yard as a record that could help locate the children’s parents after the war. The Nazis arrested her in 1943, but she refused despite repeated torture to reveal their names.
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.
