Irena Sendler: The Smuggler of Warsaw

Irena Sendler, a Polish social worker, smuggled approximately 2,500 Jewish children out of the Warsaw Ghetto between 1940 and 1943. She used toolboxes, body bags, and even dogs trained to bark when she passed to create distractions. Children were given new identities and placed with Polish families or in convents. Sendler kept detailed records of each child's real and fake identity in glass jars buried under her neighbor's apple tree. The Gestapo captured and tortured her — breaking both her legs — but she refused to reveal where the children were hidden. She was sentenced to death but escaped when a guard, bribed by the Polish resistance, let her go.