I found this on Little Green Footballs yesterday afternoon and see it has made it’s way to Cdr Salamander’s blog, too.

A Polish woman, Irena Sendler, saved 2,500 Jewish children between 1940 and 1943, before she was arrested by the Nazis and then tortured. She never gave up the names of the children. 2500. Think about it: 2500 lives snatched from the jaws of certain death, by a woman, who was not Jewish, and knew full well of the penalty for such rescue work. 2500 people, many of who, by basic demographics, have had generations flow from them, which would have otherwise been truncated forever. She is still alive and was honored in Warsaw by a ceremony the 93 year old woman was unable to attend. The Boston Herald has a detailed story of this woman’s heroism:

WARSAW, Poland – Irena Sendler saved nearly 2,500 Jewish children from the Nazis, organizing a ring of 20 Poles to smuggle them out of the Warsaw Ghetto in baskets and ambulances.

The Nazis arrested her, but she didn’t talk under torture. After she survived the war, she expressed regret – for doing too little.

Lawmakers in Poland’s Senate disagreed Wednesday, unanimously passing a resolution honoring her and the Polish underground’s Council for Assisting Jews, of which her ring of mostly Roman Catholics was a part.

Poland’s goverment-in-exile set up the secret organization in 1942 to help save Jews from the Nazi-established ghettoes and labor camps.

Anyone caught helping Jews in Nazi-occupied Poland risked being summarily shot, along with family members. The resolution honored Sendler for organizing the ”rescue of the most defenseless victims of the Nazi ideology: the Jewish children.”
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It seems to me, as I have seen others commenting around the blogosphere, that she is the very kind of person who deserves to be held up as a role model, and not these bored little rich girls we see splashed about the media.

I, for one, have faith that this woman will most certainly be greeted with “Well done, my good and faithful servant” when she leaves this life on Earth.

Go, read, and have a renewing of the mind with this story.