I just wanted to post this entire article here. I think it is a wonderful story of goodness even during evil times and why humans can and will survive if they continue to place their faith in things that are good and noble even at risk of death.
Irena Sendler, who was only a social worker in Warsaw when the Germans occupied Poland in 1939, was the woman who single-handedly rescued over 2,500 Jewish children from the infamous Warsaw Ghetto. She would literally talk parents into trusting her with their most prized possessions on earth before the Nazi war machine could kill them.
Then, because she could move in and out of the Ghetto several times a day under the guise of providing humanitarian aid, she would smuggle the children out so they could be "adopted" by Polish families until the war was over. She and her underground provided new names and identities for the Jewish children and only Irena knew their whereabouts.
She would carefully write the names on cigarette papers, both the real name and the aliases, with the idea of reuniting the families when the horrors would end, and she kept the names in some jars that were carefully buried in a nearby garden.
She was ingenious in her methods. She even trained a dog to bark so it would stifle the cries of a scared child when they passed a German checkpoint. She used the city sewers, underground tunnels and all sorts of routes to spirit the children to safety.
Eventually she was caught and brutally tortured, but, when the Germans found there was no way to break her, she was taken to be killed. The underground paid a huge bribe, and her life was miraculously spared by a guard who knocked her unconscious, threw her from a truck, and later said he had shot her.
She then lived in secrecy, daring not even attend her mother's funeral, until the end of the war and then she dug up the jars and reunited the children with their families. Many of the parents had died in the concentration camps and gas chambers, but Irena Sendler got almost all of them back to extended members of families, so great was her personal vow.
Curiously most have never heard her story, about how she was never again able to walk without crutches after the way the German torturers had crushed her feet and legs, and maybe her own disdain at being hailed as a hero was the reason.
"Every Jewish child who survived due to my efforts has justified my existence on this earth, but it is no cause for praise," she once said.
"We who were rescuing children are not some kind of heroes. That term irritates me greatly. The opposite is true. I continue to have qualms of conscience that I did so little . . this regret will follow me to my death."
In recent years, as many of the children she saved began to speak out, she couldn't overwhelm her legend.
Irena Sendler was awarded the Order of the White Eagle, the country of Poland's highest decoration and . . she was a runner-up for last year's Nobel Peace Prize before she died quietly on May 10, 2008, of pneumonia at the age of 98.
~ The Author is Roy Exum from Chattanooga, Tennessee, whose articles and stories have been featured and shared in both the local and national media ~
A True Angel Has Died 
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