Irena Sendler: The Nurse Who Declared War on Hitler

Nursing school teaches you the famous names, Florence Nightingale, Clara Barton, Dorothea Dix. Irena Sendler belongs on that list, and almost no one says it. A Polish nurse and social worker, she smuggled roughly 2,500 Jewish children out of the Warsaw Ghetto and kept records so their families could find them again.

Sendler was born in 1910 in Warsaw and raised in Otwock, about 15 miles away. Her father, a doctor who treated mostly poor Jewish patients, shaped her early. She trained as a nurse and social worker and used that standing to move through German-occupied Warsaw during World War II.

As head of the children's division of Zegota, the Polish underground council that aided Jews, she got around 2,500 children out of the Ghetto, gave them false identities, and placed them with non-Jewish families, orphanages, and convents. She buried the children's real names in jars under an apple tree, planning to reunite them with their parents after the war. Most of those parents were killed in the death camps.

Her network used whatever worked. Children went out hidden under stretchers in ambulances, through a courthouse that bordered the Ghetto, through the underground sewers, in sacks on trolleys, and packed into briefcases, toolboxes, coffins, and potato sacks. The Germans caught on in October 1943, arrested her, tortured her, and sentenced her to death. She escaped when the resistance bribed a Gestapo agent, and survived the war with the children's records intact.

Late in life, Poland awarded Sendler the Order of the White Eagle, its highest honor. In 2007 she was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize and named a national hero by the Polish parliament. She lived out her years in a Warsaw apartment and died in May 2008. Schools across Poland now carry her name.