Poland honours woman who saved 2,500 Jews

Poland’s parliament today honoured Irena Sendler, a 97-year-old credited with saving 2,500 Jews during the Holocaust, at a ceremony during which the country’s president said she deserved the Nobel Peace Prize.

At a special session, members of the Warsaw Senate – the upper house of parliament – unanimously approved a resolution honouring Sendler and the Polish underground Council for Assisting Jews.

The group’s members, mostly Roman Catholics, risked their own lives to save Jews from the Holocaust in Nazi-occupied Poland.

The resolution honoured Sendler, who lives in a nursing home in Warsaw and was too frail to attend the session, for organising the “rescue of the most defenceless victims of the Nazi ideology – the Jewish children”.

President Lech Kacyzinski said in an address to senators that Sendler was a “great hero who can be justly named for the Nobel Peace Prize.”

Sendler led a team of 20 helpers who smuggled Jewish children out of the Warsaw Ghetto to safety between 1940 and 1943, placing them in Polish families, convents or orphanages.

The Nazis arrested her in 1943, but she refused – despite being tortured repeatedly – to reveal their names.