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Irena Sendler, who saved 2,500 Jewish children, dies at 98 By Haaretz Correspondent and AP , By Yossi Melman Irena Sendler - a Polish social worker who helped save some 2,500 Jewish children from the Nazis by smuggling them out of the Warsaw Ghetto at great risk to her life - died at 98 in a Warsaw hospital yesterday. Sendler, born in 1910 as Irena Krzyzanowska, was honored with the Yad Vashem Righteous Gentile medal in 1965. Advertisement When World War II broke out, Sendler opened soup kitchens for the poor, orphaned and homeless Jews whose possessions and homes and bank accounts had been confiscated by the Nazis. In 1942, then a senior director in Warsaw's welfare department, Sendler joined the Zegota - the codename for the underground Polish organization the Council for Aid to Jews. Operating under the auspices of the London-based exiled Polish Government, Sendler helped Jews find a safe place in occupied Poland. Sendler, codenamed Jolenta, masterminded the rescue operations of Jewish children from the Warsaw Ghetto. Anyone caught helping Jews in Nazi-occupied Poland risked being summarily shot. Under the pretext of inspecting the Ghetto's sanitary conditons during a typhoid outbreak, Sendler and some 20 assistants entered the compound. With the help of the Polish underground, they registered Jews under fictitious Christian names and obtained papers testifying that they had contagious diseases such as typhoid to prevent the Nazis from inspecting them. Babies and small children were smuggled out in ambulances and in trams, sometimes wrapped up as packages. In one operation she put a dog in the ambulance's front passenger seat. Its loud barking drowned out the crying children. Teenagers escaped by joining teams of workers forced to labor outside the ghetto. They were placed in families, orphanages, hospitals or convents. In the hopes of one day uniting the children with their families - most of whom perished in Nazi death camps - Sendler wrote the children's real names on slips of paper that she kept at home. When German police came to arrest her in 1943, an assistant managed to hide the slips, which Sendler later buried in a jar under an apple tree in an associate's yard. Some 2,500 names were recorded. Despite Gestapo torture, she refused to expose the identity of the children she had saved. She was sentenced to death but was saved when her underground friends bribed a guard to add her name to the list of people who had already been executed. In an interview she gave in 1995 to Jewish-French writer and filmmaker Marek Halter, she said she regretted only one thing: "I could have done more," she said tearfully. "This feeling of regret will accompany me until my dying day." Bookmark to del.icio.us   A few good celebs Some of Hollywood's top guns congratulate Israel in a clip played in Times Square. Chosen, shmosen 'Religion is an incarnation of the most childish superstitions,' wrote Albert Einstein.

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