Irena Sendler: She saved 2,500 children from the Warsaw Ghetto

There are stories that need to be told, stories of men and women who changed the world. The story of Irena Sendler is one of them.
Irena Sendler was born on February 15, 1910 in Warsaw. She was a nurse and also a Polish social worker, she cooperated with the resistance in the Second World War.
Her goal was to save Jewish children from the ghetto. It is probable that her compassionate nature was inherited from her father, who was a medical worker and who died of typhus after treating sick people, mostly Jews, himself became ill, which other colleagues refused to treat.As a social worker, the woman managed to get a special permit to enter the ghetto in search of any symptoms of typhus: during these checks, she took many small children, hiding them in ambulances or other vehicles.She even managed to disguise herself as a plumber: in that way, she entered the ghetto in a van and put many babies at the bottom of the tool box and older children in bags. To cover up the inevitable crying of the children, she was also holding a dog in the back of the truck when Nazi soldiers approached.Instead of a certain death, those children were then entrusted to Christian families or monasteries, and Sendler provided them with false documents. She later stated that the real heroes are those mothers and fathers who decided to accept those children in order to save them from death.

But Irena went further: she wrote down the names of the rescued children and put these lists in bottles and jars with marmalade that she buried near a tree in her garden. She hoped to one day return the children to their parents. Unfortunately, that was not possible because most of the families of the rescued children were exterminated.

In 1943, the Gestapo arrested her and tortured her severely: her legs and arms were broken, but she did not reveal her secret to anyone. She was sentenced to death, but with the help of Polish resistance she managed to save herself. She was powerless to live.
In 2007, a year before her death, she was declared a hero of the nation in Poland. These are her words in response to this important acknowledgment: "Every child saved with my help is a justification for my existence on this earth, not a title of glory."On May 12, 2008, this brave and strong woman passed away, a woman who "gave birth" to over 2,000 children. The children she saved have become adults and owe her the gift of life.

The amazing story of this woman has not been forgotten, only thanks to a group of students from Kansas, her story has spread around the world: in 1999, in fact, a project was launched that will support public knowledge about this story.