On May 12 2008, a 98 year-old Polish lady named Irena Sendler passed away. She was no ordinary lady. During World War II, Irena got permission to work in the Warsaw Ghetto as a plumbing/sewer worker. She had an ‘ulterior motive’ …. She KNEW what the Nazi’s plans were for the Jews. Irena smuggled infants out in the bottom of the tool box she carried and she carried in the back of her truck a burlap sack, (for larger kids..) She also had a dog in the back that she trained to bark when the Nazi soldiers let her in and out of the ghetto. The soldiers of course wanted nothing to do with the dog and the barking covered the noises made by the kids/infants. During her time of doing this, she managed to smuggle out and save 2500 kids & infants.

In October 1943, alerted by an informer, Irena was arrested. Irena was taken to the notorious Pawiak prison where she was methodically tortured and beaten until her arms and legs were broken. She never revealed the names of the children that she had smuggled out of the ghetto or of her underground colleagues who had assisted her.

Prior to her arrest, Irena kept a record of the names of all the kids she smuggled out and kept them in glass jars, buried under a tree in her back yard. After the war, she dug out the jars and tried to locate any parents that may have survived it and reunited the family. Most had been gassed. Those kids she helped got placed into foster family homes or were adopted.

In 2007 Irene was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize…..she did not win the prize.

And do you know who won the prize?

Give it a guess.

The winner was Al Gore for his work on Global Warming. It led to widespread criticisms that the Nobel Peace Prize was a sham.

64 years later