She risked her life while helping to spirit Jewish children out of the Warsaw Ghetto during World War II.

Tells story of Irena Sendler who organized the rescue of 2,500 Jewish children during World War II, and the teenagers who started the investigation into Irena's heroism.

Presents the story of a Holocaust rescuer to reveal the formidable risks she took to her own safety to save some 2,500 children from death and deportation in Nazi-occupied Poland during World War II.

From the New York Times bestselling author of The Widow Clicquot comes an extraordinary and gripping account of Irena Sendler—the “female Oskar Schindler”—who took staggering risks to save 2,500 children from death and deportation in Nazi-occupied Poland during World War II. In 1942, one young social worker, Irena Sendler, was granted access to the Warsaw ghetto as a public health specialist. While she was there, she began to understand the fate that awaited the Jewish families who were unable to leave. Soon she reached out to the trapped families, going from door to door and asking them to trust her with their young children. Driven to extreme measures and with the help of a network of local tradesmen, ghetto residents, and her star-crossed lover in the Jewish resistance, Irena ultimately smuggled thousands of children past the Nazis. She made dangerous trips through the city’s sewers, hid children in coffins, snuck them under overcoats at checkpoints, and slipped them through secret passages in abandoned buildings. But Irena did something even more astonishing at immense personal risk: she kept a secret list buried in bottles under an old apple tree in a friend’s back garden. On it were the names and true identities of these Jewish children, recorded so their families could find them after the war. She could not know that more than ninety percent of their families would perish. Irena’s Children, “a fascinating narrative of…the extraordinary moral and physical courage of those who chose to fight inhumanity with compassion” (Chaya Deitsch author of Here and There: Leaving Hasidism, Keeping My Family), is a truly heroic tale of survival, resilience, and redemption.

She risked her life while helping to spirit Jewish children out of the Warsaw Ghetto during World War II.

This book offers the first English translation of the compelling heroine story of Irena Sendler, a Polish Catholic who organized the rescue of more than 2,500 Jewish children from the Warsaw ghetto during World War II. In the fall of 1999, four young girls from Kansas began research for a high school history project. The students were inspired by a magazine article about Irena Sendler, and after discovering that Sendler was still alive, they exchanged letters with her and eventually traveled to Poland to meet with her. The play the students wrote as a result of their research and multiple interviews spawned worldwide interest in the epic story of one person who managed to save the lives of 2,500 children in Poland under German occupation. This new translation brings the universally appealing story of Irena Sendler to an English-speaking audience for the first time. It contains moving accounts of courage and hope in the face of tremendous danger, cruelty, and terrifying uncertainty. It also portrays the unspeakable emotional distress suffered by the children's parents who chose to give them up, and communicates the decades of immense longing, loneliness, and guilt of the rescuees for having survived while their families did not. - Based on sound scholarship and research while also being easy to read and accessible to a wide readership - Provides a complete, chronological presentation of Sendler's life, from her childhood, education, and wartime humanitarian efforts to her postwar experiences, including her professional and personal life and her visit to Israel - Presents unique information from letters and interviews with the now-elderly children Sendler rescued over 60 years ago, illuminating the dramatic influence she had upon their lives - Contains several sections written in the voice of Irena Sendler, resulting in a lively, conversational first-person narrative that gives a reading experience akin to sitting with Sendler and hearing her story firsthand

"Tells Irena Sendler's story of saving 2,500 children during the Holocaust"--