When World War II broke out, Irena Sendler was a 29-year-old social worker in Warsaw. After the Nazis sealed some 400,000 Jews inside the ghetto, she got a permit to go in and inspect sanitary conditions, and she used it to help. Working with the underground group Zegota under the code name Jolanta, she and her partners smuggled Jewish children out and placed them in orphanages, convents, and with Polish families, keeping coded lists of where they were. In October 1943 the Gestapo arrested her. She was sentenced to death, but the underground bribed officials to set her free, and she went right back to work. Nobody knows exactly how many children she and her partners saved.
