A woman of valour

Please click over to Meryl Yourish's indispensable blog and read this post "A woman of valour" about Irena Sendler, who has just passed away at the age of 98. I added a comment to Meryl's post, but wouldn't change a word of what she has written even if I could.

Thanks, Meryl.

5/17/08 BUMPED UP AND UPDATED: The Wall Street Journal has weighed in with an eloquent tribute, "Irena's Worlds," which originally ran in Wall Street Journal Europe.

The Talmud says that "whoever saves a life, it is considered as if he saved an entire world." Irena Sendlerowa, who died Monday at the age of 98 in Warsaw, saved some 2,500 worlds.

During the Nazi occupation of her country, this Polish Catholic woman risked her life and endured unspeakable torture to rescue Jewish children from the Holocaust. As a member of "Zegota," the organization set up by the Polish underground to help Jews, she masterminded a daring rescue operation: Posing as a nurse, she and about 20 other Poles smuggled about 2,500 Jewish children out of the Warsaw ghetto.

Spirited out in ambulances, coffins, sacks and through sewers and tunnels, the kids were given Christian names and placed with Polish families, convents and orphanages. Sendlerowa meticulously recorded the children's real names and their new identities so that they could be eventually reunited with their parents. Most of them, though, had no family to return to after the war.

In 1943, the Germans arrested Sendlerowa. They broke her legs and feet to get her to divulge the names of her helpers and the children's whereabouts. She told them nothing. Sentenced to death, Sendlerowa narrowly escaped after Zegota bribed a guard. She continued her underground work until Germany's defeat.

Recognition, which she never sought, came late in her life. Yad Vashem, Israel's Holocaust memorial, honored her in 1965. The Communists didn't let her travel to accept the award. In 2003 she received the Order of the White Eagle, Poland's highest civilian decoration. Polish President Lech Kaczynski lobbied hard for her to win the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize. But Al Gore got the award.

Ill health prevented Sendlerowa from attending a Polish parliament ceremony last year that recognized her as a national hero. Instead she told the lawmakers in a letter: "Every child saved with my help and the help of all the wonderful secret messengers, who today are no longer living, is the justification of my existence on this earth, and not a title to glory."

That's the way it always is with true heroes. Invariably, they're reluctant to talk about their deeds, and do so only when they must. Characteristically, they deny that they did anything out of the ordinary, and insist they they were just doing their jobs. Nevertheless, despite this remarkable woman's modesty, there's no doubt that she has earned her "title to glory," along with a place at God's right hand.