Irena Sendler, who is now 96 years old, saved over 2500 Jewish children from the Warsaw ghetto during the Nazi occupation of Poland. She has been selected as one of the candidates for the Nobel Peace Prize this year. From the autumn of 1940 onwards, Irena Sendler, disguised as a Red Cross nurse, took food, medicines and money into the Warsaw ghetto, where some 440,000 Jews were confined. Then, from 1942, she coordinated aid for the children in the ghetto on behalf of an underground organization of the Polish National Army (Armia Krajowa) called “Zegota”. There are no reliable estimates of how many died in the Warsaw ghetto. Some sources suggest, however, that at least 500 children died there each day in the summer of 1941. When, in the second half of 1942, the Nazis began to clear the ghetto and to deport its inhabitants to the death camps, Sendler tried to save as many children as she could, entrusting them under false names to Polish families, orphanages and convents. Their real identity papers, placed in bottles hidden in the ground, have been preserved and at the end of the war were returned to them. In 1943 Irena Sendler was arrested by the Gestapo and sentenced to death. However, thanks to a ransom paid by the “Zegota” organization, she was released, but was forced to hide under an assumed name until the end of the war. Subsequently she dedicated herself to helping orphan children and the elderly victims of Nazism. In 1965 the Yad Vashem Institute in Jerusalem conferred on her the title of Just among the Nations and in 1991 she received honorary citizenship of the State of Israel.
