With support from the University of Richmond

History News Network

History News Network puts current events into historical perspective. Subscribe to our newsletter for new perspectives on the ways history continues to resonate in the present. Explore our archive of thousands of original op-eds and curated stories from around the web. Join us to learn more about the past, now.

Irena's list: Holocaust heroine's untold story

This week, a 97-year-old Polish woman was finally honoured for saving thousands of Jewish children from extermination in Nazi death camps. Claire Soares tells her extraordinary tale.

Behind the doors of a Polish nursing home sits a woman who might be described as the female Oskar Schindler. She didn't have his industrial machinery or his financial might, but the one-time health worker rescued twice as many Jews from the horrors of the Holocaust. Nearly 2,500 children were saved from Warsaw's Ghetto and an almost certain death in the concentration camps -- all thanks to Irena Sendlerowa.

Ms Sendlerowa, now 97, smuggled Jewish babies and children out in sacks, through sewer pipes and even hidden under stretchers in ambulances. They were then farmed out to non-Jewish foster families where they were given false identities and taught to speak Polish and rattle off Christian prayers so they could fool prying Gestapo officers...
Read entire article at Independent