Recognition of Woman who Saved 2,500 Jews

Sendler is consitered a Utopian hero because she risked her life so that others could have and enjoy life. Utopian heroes are those that further life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, that advance human rights significantly, or that further the just recognition of the necessities of human life as law.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070314/ap_on_re_eu/poland_holocaust_hero

Poland honors woman who saved 2,500 Jews By RYAN LUCAS, Associated Press Writer

WARSAW, Poland – A 97-year-old woman credited with saving 2,500 Jewish children during the Holocaust was honored by parliament Wednesday at a ceremony during which Poland’s president said she deserves the Nobel Peace Prize.

Sendler was cited for organizing the “rescue of the most defenseless victims of the Nazi ideology — the Jewish children.”

Sendler led about 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.

She wrote the children’s names on slips of paper and buried them in jars in a neighbor’s yard as a record that could help locate their parents after the war.  The Nazis arrested her in 1943, but she refused — despite repeated torture — to reveal their names.

Anyone caught helping Jews in Nazi-occupied Poland risked being summarily shot, along with family members.

In 1965, Israel’s Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial awarded Sendler one of its first medals given to people who saved Jews, the so-called “Righteous Among the Nations.”

She was given the honor in 1983, after Poland’s Communist authorities finally agreed to allow her to travel abroad.

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