Irena Sendler passed away in May

I've always had a heart for the Jewish people and an interest in the Holocaust. I've recently found more articles about a Polish Holocaust survivor I've followed. The story of Irena Sendler grabbed my full attention from the moment I first read about her.

During WWII, Irena (a Polish citizen) was able to secure work in the Warsaw Ghetto. She joined the organized resistance of Zegota in order to rescue children from the Nazi's. As an employee of the Social Welfare Department, she had a special permit to enter the Warsaw Ghetto, to check for signs of typhus. Under the pretext of conducting inspections of sanitary conditions, Sendler visited the ghetto and smuggled out babies and small children in ambulances and trams, sometimes disguising them as packages and even smuggling them out in tool boxes.

As early as 1939, when the Germans invaded Poland, she began helping Jews by offering them food and shelter. Irena and her helpers created over 3,000 false documents to help Jewish families before ever joining Zegota. She hid lists of the children's names in jars, in order to keep track of their original and new identities. After the war, she dug up the jars containing the children's identities and began an attempt to find the children and return them to living parents. However, almost all the children's parents had died at the Treblinka extermination camp. The children she was able to help were placed into foster family homes or adopted.

When she was eventually caught by the Gestapo, she was severely tortured, and sentenced to death. The Zegota was able to bribe the Nazis and save her life yet she was left for dead in the woods, unconscious and with broken arms and legs. She recovered but was forced into living in hiding for the rest of the war.

The movie, Schindler's List, was made about Oskar Schindler who rescued approximately 1,000 lives via work in his factory. Both Oskar and Irena stated they were no heroes and were still haunted by the lives they could not save. Last year Irena was up for the Nobel Peace Prize. She was not selected...

Al Gore won, for his slide show on "global warming".

I, for one, feel he should promptly return the prize.