Virtual Deadlines

Here’s a real hero

Posted on 14 May 2008 by Jeanne DePaul

Every time I read about someone christening another athlete a hero, I shake my head. It’s perhaps impressive when someone can hit a walk-off grand-slam home run, but in no way is it heroic.

So when I run across someone who truly is heroic, I marvel at such bravery. That’s the case of Irena Sendler, who saved what some estimate as 2,500 Jewish children during the Nazi’s reign of evil and terror in Poland. She died May 12 in Warsaw at the age of 98.

Her obituary in the Washington Post reads in part:

Mrs. Sendler, aiding Jews since the start of the war, became an early activist in the clandestine group Zegota. The underground movement — whose members faced execution if caught — formed in 1942 after the deportation of 280,000 of Warsaw’s Jews to the Treblinka death camp.

Mrs. Sendler used her senior position with the city’s welfare department to win access to and from the ghetto and set up a network of 25 associates to help organize escapes and falsify documents.

If families agreed, she smuggled their children out of the Warsaw ghetto in the early 1940s. The children were saved but most of their parents perished.

Of course, she said her work was not heroic, that she could have done more and that she regretted not having saved more children.

Sorry Mrs. Sendler, but I don’t agree.

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Photo caption: Irena Sendler in March 2007. Photo by Katarina Stoltz/Reuters