By Claire Soares
Tuesday, 13 May 2008

Irena Sendlerowa, a Polish woman who smuggled thousands of children out of the Warsaw Ghetto
saving them from certain death at the hands of the Nazis, has died at the age of 98.

As a social worker, she had neither the financial might nor the contact book of Oskar
Schindler, to whom she is almost inevitably compared, yet she rescued almost double the
number of children, about 2,500 in total. The tricks of her trade were not elaborate: tool
boxes, trolleys, suitcases and old sewer pipes were used to smuggleJewish babies and
toddlers out of the ghetto, undetected by the Nazis.

"Her courageous activities ... serve as a beacon of light to the world, inspiring hope and
restoring faith in the innate goodness of mankind," said Avner Shalev, the chairman of
Israel's Holocaust memorial centre, Yad Vashem.

Officially recognised as a national hero by the Polish parliament last year as well as being
nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize, Ms Sendlerowa only belatedly received the acclaim she
deserved, living in relative obscurity until a decade ago.

That her story was almost forgotten was in part the legacy of the anti-Semitism fostered by
Poland's postwar Communist regime, and in part her own modesty.

"I continue to have qualms of conscience that I did so little," she said in one of her last
interviews at the nursing home in Warsaw where she spent her twilight years.