Irena Sendler was a Polish woman, a social worker, who, in the middle of World War II, in the middle of the worst killing in a country where the Germans would kill you if you tried to help a Jew, decided to save Jewish children trapped in the Warsaw Ghetto.
She couldn't save all of them. There were too many and the Germans were killing them too fast, but somehow she and her friends in the Polish Underground were able to save 2,500 Jewish Children.
This Sunday, April 19, CBS is showing a movie about her called The Courageous Heart of Irena Sendler.
You can also learn more about her by visiting a website started by a group of school children in Kansas to keep alive the memory of what she did. Their project is called Life in a Jar, and its name comes from something Irena Sendler did so that eventually after the war the Jewish children she saved could know who they were. She made lists of the children's real names and put the lists in jars, then buried the jars in a garden, so that someday she could dig up the jars and find the children to tell them of their real identity.
Here's a short video about how the Kansas school children found out about Irena Sendler:
To learm more about Irene Sendler, I recommend the following cite, dedicated to making a documentary about her and the Poles who worked with her: In the Name of their Mothers: The Story of Irene Sendler. The film includes some of the last interviews she gave.
