Irena Sendler was a social worker in Warsaw. That was her job title. What she actually did, between 1942 and 1943, was smuggle approximately 2,500 Jewish children out of the Warsaw Ghetto — in toolboxes, in potato sacks, in coffins, through sewer pipes, inside ambulances under sedation. She was born in 1910 in Otwock, Poland, and she died in 2008 in Warsaw, which means she lived long enough to see most of the world forget what she did and then, very late, remember.
The mechanism was deceptively simple. Sendler worked for the Warsaw Social Welfare Department, which gave her a pass to enter the Ghetto under the pretext of inspecting sanitary conditions. She used that pass to talk parents into handing over their children. Think about what she was asking. She was asking mothers to give their babies to a stranger with no guarantee of return. Some children went out in body bags. Some were carried out inside suitcases. Sendler buried the real names of every child in glass jars under an apple tree in a colleague's garden, so that after the war, families could be reunited. Most of those families were already dead.
The Gestapo caught her in 1943. They broke both her legs and both her feet. She gave them nothing. The underground bribed a guard to let her escape on the way to execution, and she spent the rest of the war in hiding, still coordinating rescues. Poland's communist government buried her story for decades. She was ninety-seven when a group of Kansas high school students rediscovered her in a history project. She told them she could have done more.
"Perhaps the reason the Universe gave you a broken world is so that you could have a chance to fix it."