In the spotlight: Irena Sendler 1910 - 2008

Irena Sendler (Polish: Sendlerowa), a woman who smuggled some 2,500 Jewish children out of Warsaw's Jewish ghetto during World War II, passed away last week.

Born in Warsaw in 1910, Irena Sendler, née Krzyżanowska, was a social aid worker during the war. In 1942, she took charge of the child section in Żegota, an underground organization founded by writer Zofia Kossak-Szczucka and artist Wanda Krahelska-Filipowicz to help the Jewish people trapped in the ghetto.

Using her position as a social worker, Sendler would enter the confines of the ghetto and smuggle out Jewish children to place them with Polish families on the outside and give them new identities. She hid the papers with the children's real names underground in glass jars, enabling them to recover their identities after the war.

In 1943, Sendler was arrested, tortured and sentenced to death by German secret police, the Gestapo. Żegota bribed Gestapo officials to free her. She was dumped in a forest with her arms and legs broken.

In 1965, Israel's Yad Vashem institute awarded her the title of Righteous Among the Nations. She also received the Order of the White Eagle - the highest decoration in Poland - as well as the Karski Freedom Award and the Order of Polonia Restituta's Commander's Cross with Star. Sendler was additionally distinguished as an honored citizen of both Israel and Warsaw.

Following the efforts of President Lech Kaczyński and the Children of the Holocaust association, she was nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize in 2006.

Irena Sendler's activities "serve as a beacon of light to the world, inspiring hope and restoring faith in the innate goodness of mankind," Yad Vashem chairman Avner Shalev said after her death.

Director John Kent Harrison has announced he wants make a film of Sendler's life. The film is expected to be released next year.