WARSAW (AFP) - Holocaust heroine Irena Sendler, who risked her life to save 2,500 Jewish children from Nazi genocide by smuggling them out of the Warsaw ghetto during World War II, was laid to rest Thursday in Warsaw.
She died in the Polish capital Monday, aged 98.
"Meeting her was like touching the wing of an angel of mercy," Roman Catholic priest Father Wojciech Lemanski said of Sendler at the funeral mass.
"She not only did good, but also knew how to awake this ability in others. She went from home to home looking for those who needed help," he said.
Speaking for hundreds of others like him, Professor Michal Glowinski said that as a child Sendler took him "beyond the ghetto walls -- out of hell -- to shelter in a place giving hope for salvation."
Poland's President Lech Kaczynski, currently visiting Israel, urged schools across Poland to observe a minute's silence in Sendler's honour.
Israel's former ambassador to Poland Shevah Weiss, Poland's chief Rabbi Michael Schudrich as well as Speaker of the Polish Parliament Bronislaw Komorowski and Deputy Prime Minister Wojciech Schetyna among others attended the ceremony.
A pre-war Polish social worker, Sendler created a clandestine network smuggling Jewish children out of the infamous Warsaw Ghetto sealed-off from the rest of the city by Poland's Nazi German occupiers in November 1941.
Some 450,000 Polish Jews were forced into ghetto, a place of hunger and squalor. By January 1943, hundreds of thousands had been deported to death camps or died inside its walls from starvation and disease or were executed.
After the Nazis arrested her in October 1943, Sendler was tortured, but still refused to talk and was sentenced to death by firing squad. She survived, freed on her way to the execution by a German officer bribed by the Polish resistance.
Sendler continued her work under an assumed name until the Soviet Red Army's defeat of Nazi Germany in Poland in 1944. It was then she dug up files she had kept on the saved children -- some 2,500 in all.
The Jewish Committee -- a Polish-Jewish organisation -- used the records to trace the children, leaving some with their adoptive Polish families while others were gradually sent to British-ruled Palestine, which in 1948 became Israel.
After the war, Sendler avoided the limelight, serving others in orphanages and old people's homes.
In 1965, she was awarded the title of Righteous Among the Nations, conferred by Israel's Yad Vashem institute on non-Jews who saved Jews from the Nazis. Poland formally recognised her work in March 2007.
But Sendler never considered 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.
