Irena Sendler was a 29-year-old Polish social worker when the Nazis sealed the Warsaw Ghetto in November 1940, confining 450,000 Jews to a 1.3-square-mile area. She had been helping Jewish families for months before the sealing, using her government-issued passes as a social inspector to move in and out of the ghetto. When the walls went up, she shifted tactics entirely.
Working under the auspices of the Polish Underground's Zegota (Council to Aid Jews), Sendler organized a network of collaborators who smuggled children out of the ghetto through any available means: in potato sacks, under coats, in coffins (the dead were often not buried immediately due to the overwhelming death rate), ambulance boxes, and -- most remarkably -- through the basement tunnels of buildings that straddled the ghetto wall.
Sendler's office was located at 9 Leopold Tella Street, a building whose basement connected to the sewer system that ran beneath the ghetto wall. She and her team -- which included several other women social workers and a sympathetic Polish policeman named Jozef Rzan -- would bring children through the tunnels, clean them up, dress them in non-Jewish clothing, and place them with Polish families, orphanages, or convents.
To keep track of the children's real identities -- so that after the war families could be reunited -- Sendler wrote their names and locations on small pieces of paper, which she sealed in glass jars. She buried these jars in a neighbor's garden under an apple tree. The children's real identities were recorded in code, using first names of flowers and trees as pseudonyms.
She saved approximately 2,500 children over the course of her operation. In October 1943, she was arrested by the Gestapo. She was tortured -- both her legs and feet were broken, and she was subjected to severe beatings that left her unable to walk. The Gestapo believed she had revealed the locations of hidden Jewish children, but she had not. She had protected every single name.
She was sentenced to death. The night before her execution, a sympathetic Gestapo guard -- a man named Otto Kuske, whose story is rarely told -- helped her escape. She spent the remainder of the war in hiding, continuing her work with Zegota.
After the war, she dug up the jars in the garden and used the records to help reunite children with their families. Many had not survived. But approximately 2,000 did, and they owed their lives to a social worker from Warsaw who believed that breaking a few laws in the service of humanity was not a crime.
Sendler was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize in 2007 by a group of American schoolchildren who had learned her story. She did not win -- that year the prize went to Al Gore and the IPCC. She died in 2008 at the age of 98.