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Polish Holocaust Hero, Irena Sendler, Dies at 98

WARSAW, Poland — Irena Sendler, a Polish social worker who organized the rescue of some 2,500 Jewish children from the Nazis and was later honored by Israel's Yad Vashem memorial, has died.

Sendler's daughter, Janina Zgrzembska, told The Associated Press her mother died at a Warsaw hospital Monday morning. She was 98.

Sendler had lived at a Warsaw nursing home run by the Catholic Brothers of St. John of God since 2003, but had been in the hospital since last month with pneumonia.

Sendler was born Irena Krzyzanowska in Warsaw on Feb. 15, 1910. As a social worker with Warsaw's welfare department, Sendler masterminded risky rescue operations of Jewish children from the Warsaw Ghetto during Nazi Germany's brutal World War II occupation.

Records show Sendler's team of some 20 people saved almost 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.
Read entire article at AP