POLAND:Poland's parliament, the Sejm, has honoured a 97-year-old woman who saved more than 2,500 Jewish children during the Nazi occupation, writes Derek Scallyin Warsaw.
Irena Sendler lives in a nursing home and was unable to attend the ceremony, during which President Lech Kaczynski described her as "a great hero who can justly be named for the Nobel Peace Prize".
Beginning in 1940, Ms Sendler, working as a social worker, and 20 helpers of the underground Zegota Council for Aiding Jews, smuggled children out of the Warsaw ghetto and placed them with Polish families. Some were hidden in workmen's bags, others were led through the city sewers.
Over the next three years, they placed more than 2,500 children with new families. Ms Sendler wrote the children's names on pieces of paper and buried them in jam jars in a neighbour's yard, to help the children find their parents later.
The plan was discovered by the occupying Nazis in 1943 and Ms Sendler was arrested. Although tortured repeatedly by the Gestapo, she refused to reveal any names, although aiding Jews was punished with death during the occupation.
Yesterday's citation praised Ms Sendler and the organisation "for rescuing the most defenceless victims of the Nazi ideology - the Jewish children".
Nearly 40 years ago, the Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial in Israel awarded Ms Sendler one of its highest honours, the designation of "Righteous Among the Nations".
She only received it in 1983, when Poland's communist authorities allowed her to travel abroad.
With more than 6,000 individual citations, Poland is the most represented nation at Yad Vashem. More than 90 per cent of the country's 3.5 million-strong Jewish community was wiped out during the Holocaust.
After the war, up to 240,000 survivors left Poland for Israel, hastened on their way by official hostility from the communist authorities and a state-sponsored anti-Semitic campaign in the 1960s. Up to 12,000 Jews live in Poland today, mostly in Warsaw.