Irena Sendler’s father taught her that if someone is drowning, you help them, regardless of their religion or nationality. That upbringing led the Polish Catholic social worker to risk her own life to help save 2,500 Jewish babies and children from the clutches of Nazi terror.

Sendler was a 29-year-old social worker in Warsaw when World War II began in 1939. The following year, the Nazis forced Warsaw’s Jews into the ghetto, and Sendler began using her position and connections to smuggle food and money to them.

She joined Zegota, the underground, state-sponsored Council for Aid to Jews, which formed in 1942. Zegota helped hide Polish Jews from Hitler’s regime, in addition to providing them with food, financial assistance, forged documents, and medical care. As head of Zegota’s children’s section in 1943, Sendler focused her efforts on getting babies and children to safety.

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How she got into the Warsaw ghetto to help

Between 1940 and 1943, most of the Jews in the Warsaw ghetto were killed. Tens of thousands died of starvation and disease in the dirty, overcrowded conditions. Around 265,000 were sent to the Treblinka extermination camp in 1942. An uprising of resistors resulted in the destruction of what remained of the ghetto and the deportation of whoever........

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