One of the true heroines of our time, a woman who saved thousands of Jewish children from the Nazi Holocaust, Irena Sendler has died at the age of 98.

What she witnessed haunted her to the end of her life. Rest in peace, Irena.

The petite woman with the black bonnet sat on a reclining chair in a central Warsaw nursing home.

The 94-year-old could not get the image of the skeletally thin children lying in the street of the Warsaw Ghetto, meekly whispering “bread,” out of her mind.

It was 2004, nearly six decades after World War II, but the horrors of the Holocaust were still alive for Irena Sendler.

Sendler, who, with a group of friends, is credited with sneaking 2,500 Jewish children out of the ghetto, died on Monday in a Polish hospital from pneumonia. She was 98.

Sendler was one of the first to be awarded Yad Vashem’s highest honor - she was declared a Righteous Gentile in 1965 for risking her life to save Jews during the Shoah - but it was only in her golden years that she received recognition from the Polish government, which, together with Holocaust survivor groups, nominated her for the Nobel Prize two years ago, after decades in which Communist governments frowned on her heroic actions.

Sendler’s story - and her connections with the Jewish community - began on the outskirts of Warsaw, where as a young girl she was taught at home that people are either good or bad, and should not be judged based on race, religion or nationality, she recounted in the 2004 interview with The Jerusalem Post.

“Whatever I did had its roots in my family home,” Sendler said, as she told her story through an interpreter.

When Germany invaded Poland in the fall of 1939, Sendler was just shy of her 30th birthday.

“The whole of Poland was drowning in blood, but the Jewish nation was suffering the most, with the Jewish children the most vulnerable,” she recalled.

Sendler and a group of friends in the Warsaw municipality’s social welfare department started producing false documents to provide Jews in the ghetto with monetary assistance that the Germans had cut off.

After 1940 the ghetto was closed off to non-Jews, and Sendler and her friends could not get in to distribute the funds.

She soon learned that one sanitation company was still allowed into the ghetto. Sendler got the Polish director of the service to employ her and 10 friends so they could continue helping Jews.

For the next two years, dressed as nurses, Sendler and her friends carried food, money, and medicine hidden in their dresses to ghetto residents. As conditions deteriorated, and the liquidation of ghetto began, Sendler came to the realization that the only chance for the children to survive was to escape.

Also see:
Life in a Jar: The Irena Sendler Project