Irena Sendler, a petite social worker, was not yet thirty years old when Nazi tanks rolled into Warsaw in September of 1939. When the city's Jews were imprisoned behind a ghetto wall without food or medicine, she appealed to her closest friends and colleagues, mostly young women, some barely out of their teens. Together, they smuggled aid in and smuggled Jewish orphans out of the ghetto by hiding infants on trams and garbage wagons and leading older children out through secret passageways and the city’s sewers. Catholic birth certificates and identity papers were forged and signed by priests and high ranking officials in the Social Services Department so that the children could be taken from safe houses in Warsaw to orphanages and convents in the surrounding countryside.

The scheme was fraught with danger. The city was crawling with ruthless blackmailers, and the Gestapo were constantly on the look out for Jews who …show more content…
I would wake them up during the night to say the prayer," says the Sendler collaborator who had joined the Polish Resistance as a teenager. "And then I had to teach them how to behave in a church, a Christian Church."

"They treated me like their own child," says Poitr Zettinger, recalling how the sisters would warn him when the Gestapo came to the convent. "They would tell me when I should hide so I'd run up to the attic. I'd hide in a cupboard there." William Donat, a New York businessman, describes the conflicts inherent in the extraordinary situation. "I was baptized and I was converted and, became a very, very strong Catholic. I was praying every day for perhaps a little more food and for Jesus to forgive me for the terrible sin that I had been born a Jew."

Sendler and her cohorts kept meticulous records of the children's Jewish names so that they could be reunited with their parents after the war. Donat was one of the few whose parents