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
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...