Dead at 98: Heroic Irena Sendler, who helped save 2,500 Jewish children from the Nazis

SOURCE HERE

A woman who risked her life saving 2,500 Jewish children from the gas chambers died yesterday aged 98.
Irena Sendler, a social worker, smuggled them out of the Warsaw Ghetto and gave them false identities.
She died at a Warsaw hospital after she had been in hospital for a month with pneumonia.

Mrs Sendler was serving as a social worker with the city's welfare department during World War II when she masterminded the risky rescue operations of Jewish children from the Warsaw Ghetto.
Records show that her team of some 20 people saved nearly 2,500 children from the Warsaw Ghetto between October 1940 and April 1943, when the Nazis burned the ghetto, shooting the residents or sending them to death camps.
"A great person has died - a person with a great heart, with great organizational talents, a person who always stood on the side of the weak," Marek Edelman, the last surviving leader of the 1943 Warsaw Ghetto uprising, told TVN24 television.
Under the pretext of inspecting the ghetto's sanitary conditions during a typhoid outbreak, Mrs Sendler and her assistants went inside in search of children who could be smuggled out and given a chance of survival by living as Catholics.
Babies and small children were smuggled out in ambulances and in trams, sometimes wrapped up as packages.

More HERE.