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POPSIrena Sendler Saved 2500 Jewish Children In Warsaw Ghetto On Oct. 20, 1943, the Gestapo arrested her and took her to Pawiak prison, where subversives were tortured and killed. Over three months, her detainers used clubs and other devices to fracture her legs and feet. She did not inform on Zegota leaders and was sentenced to death by firing squad, but a bribed guard helped her escape and marked her as having been executed. Mrs. Sendler remained incognito for the rest of the war -- she could not even risk attending her mother's funeral -- and continued to help Zegota. Yad Vashem, the Holocaust memorial in Israel, recognized Mrs. Sendler in 1965 as "Righteous Among the Nations," the designation for gentiles who aided Jews during the war. The number of children saved by Mrs. Sendler and her partners is unknown, according to Yad Vashem, but some estimates by survivors groups claim more than 2,500. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/05/12/AR2008051202751_pf.html
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POPSRIP Irena Sendler - Lost Nobel Peace Prize to Al Gore "Mrs. Sendler used her contacts at orphanages and convents to keep Jewish children safe until the war's end, often under Christianized names. To alert nuns to a new group of children ready for pick up, she could write, "I have clothing for the convent." The intention was to return all the children to their parents, although the death rate of the adult population made the task largely impossible. But for years Mrs. Sendler guarded the real names of the children and their parents, writing them on tissue paper and burying the lists in jars under an apple tree at an associate's home. "
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POPSPortrait of Courage: Irena Sendler From the article: "In 1943, she was captured by the Nazis and tortured but refused to tell her captors who her co-conspirators were or where the bottles were buried. She also resisted in other ways. According to Felt, when Sendler worked in the prison laundry, she and her co-workers made holes in the German soldiers' underwear. When the officers discovered what they had done, they lined up all the women and shot every other one. It was just one of many close calls for Sendler."
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POPSPolish Holocaust hero dies at age 98 Yad Vashem Chairman Avner Shalev said Sender's "courageous activities rescuing Jews during the Holocaust serve as a beacon of light to the world, inspiring hope and restoring faith in the innate goodness of mankind." Despite the Yad Vashem honor, Sendler was largely forgotten in her homeland until recent years. She came to the world's attention in 2000 when a group of schoolgirls from Uniontown, Kan., wrote a short play about her called "Life in a Jar." It went on to garner international attention, and has been performed more than 200 times in the United States, Canada and Poland. Sendler, born Irena Krzyzanowska, said she lived according to her physician father's teachings, arguing that "people can be only divided into good or bad; their race, religion, nationality don't matter."
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