Irena Sendler

Irena Sendler's father was a doctor in a town near Warsaw who treated poor Jewish patients other doctors avoided. He died of typhus caught from them when she was seven. She studied at Warsaw University, where she defaced her student card in protest at the seats set aside for Jews, and became a social worker in the city's welfare department.

When the Germans walled off the Warsaw Ghetto in 1940 she obtained a pass as a sanitary inspector and went in daily, bringing food, medicine and clothes. As deportations to Treblinka began in 1942 she and a small group of colleagues, working with the underground council Zegota, began getting children out: sedated babies in tool boxes and ambulances, older children through the courthouse that straddled the ghetto wall, through cellars and the sewers. Persuading mothers to hand over a child to a stranger was, she said, the hardest part, and some parents refused.

The children were placed with convents, orphanages and Polish families under false names. She recorded every child's real name and location on strips of tissue paper and buried them in jars under an apple tree, so that families could be reunited afterwards.

In October 1943 the Gestapo arrested her. They broke her legs and feet under interrogation; she gave up nothing. She was sentenced to death and was saved when Zegota bribed a guard on the day of her execution. She lived in hiding until the war's end. Under communism her story was suppressed, and she was little known until a group of Kansas schoolgirls wrote a play about her in 1999. She died in Warsaw in 2008, aged 98.