WARSAW (EJP-AFP)--- The World Jewish Congress paid tribute to the memory of Polish war-time saviour Irena Sendler who died Monday aged 98.
During the Holocaust, she helped save the lives of some 2,500 Jewish children by smuggling them out of the Jewish ghetto in Warsaw.
"Irena Sendler was a heroine and a truly remarkable woman. Her courage and strength helped thousands of Jewish children to survive the Nazi onslaught. The Jewish people owe her an enormous debt of gratitude, and we will never forget this truly exceptional woman," WJC President Ronald Lauder said.
"Mrs. Sendler was incredibly brave, and she will always have a special place in the heart and minds of Jews around the world. It is important that future generations remember her as a beacon of humanity and hope in a sea of misery and despair," he added.
Born on February 15, 1910, Sendler, a Roman Catholic, was a social worker before the war, caring for poor Jewish families in Warsaw.
Pre-war Poland was home to 3,5 million Jews, the largest Jewish population in pre-war Europe, and the capital alone had a community of some 400,000.
"I was raised to react and save someone who is drowning, regardless of their religion or nationality," Sendler said on the www.dzieciholocaustu.pl (Children of the Holocaust) Internet site, dedicated to her by a group of those she saved.
After the 1939 German invasion of Poland, the Nazis set up ghettos across the occupied country to isolate and eventually wipe out the Jews.
The Warsaw ghetto was walled off in November 1941.
Using the cover of a sanitation worker -- a limited number of whom were allowed into the ghetto by the Nazis to check for epidemics -- Sendler smuggled in food, clothing and medicine
According to Israel's Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial authority Sendler wore an armband with the Star of David when walking through the ghetto streets "both as a sign of solidarity with the Jewish people and so as not to call attention to herself."
In 1942, Sendler joined "Zegota", a movement set up by the Polish resistance to help Jews, and began the risky work of smuggling children out of the Warsaw ghetto and placing them with Polish Catholic families or in convents.
The children were taken out by firemen or in rubbish trucks, concealed in suitcases or hidden under the coats of non-Jews who were allowed into the ghetto, such as Sendler and her team of social workers.
Sendler carefully noted down each child's first and family name, and carefully hid the information. The children were given fake, non-Jewish identities.
The Warsaw ghetto originally contained over 450,000 people, but by January 1943, deportations to death camps, summary executions, starvation and disease had reduced it to just several tens of thousands.
On October 20, 1943, six months after a failed ghetto uprising saw the Nazis wipe out the remaining inhabitants, Sendler was arrested by the Nazi secret police Gestapo. She was severely tortured and sentenced to death. But she refused to talk.
Her Nazi captors sentenced her to death by firing squad, but she was freed on her way to the execution site by a German officer who had been bribed by Żegota. She was left in the woods, unconscious and with broken arms and legs.
Resistance activities
Sendler then continued her resistance activities under an assumed name.
After the failed Warsaw uprising by the Polish resistance against the Nazis in 1944 and the subsequent arrival of Soviet troops in the capital, Sendler dug up her buried files and handed them over to a Polish-Jewish organization, the Jewish Committee.
The committee traced the hidden youngsters and placed them in children's homes in Poland or gradually sent them to British-ruled Palestine, which in 1948 became Israel.
After the war, Sendler avoided the limelight and continued to care for others, working in orphanages and old people's homes.
In 1965, she was awarded the title of Righteous Among the Nations, conferred by Yad Vashem on non-Jews who saved Jews from the Nazis.
It took many more years before she was to win recognition from Poland -- she only received an official homage in March 2007.
But Sendler said she did not consider herself a heroine.
"We who were rescuing children are not some kind of heroes. Indeed, that term irritates me greatly. The opposite is true -- I continue to have qualms of conscience that I did so little," she said.
