The Lady Al Gore Beat To Win Nobel Peace Prize

"WE who were rescuing children are not some kind of heroes. Indeed, that term irritates me greatly. The opposite is true: I continue to have qualms of conscience that I did so little." So said Irena Sendler who has died in Warsaw, aged 98. Yad Vashem called her Righteous Among the Nations and Poland bestowed on her its highest civilian decoration - the Order of the White Eagle - for saving an estimated 2500 children from the Warsaw Ghetto before they could be exterminated with all the other Jews imprisoned in that Nazi hellhole. Sendler's name is also now associated, of course, with the method she used to record the children's names.

Too frail to attend last year's parliamentary ceremony honouring her and the underground Council for Aid to Jews (Zegota) - for which she and her mostly Catholic circle worked - she sent a letter that was read at the Sejm by a woman she saved as a little baby. In part, it said:

"Every child saved with my help is the justification of my existence on this Earth, and not a title to glory."

"Over a half-century has passed since the hell of the Holocaust, but its spectre still hangs over the world and doesn't allow us to forget the tragedy."

Pope John Paul II wrote a rare personal letter to Sendler in 2003:

Honorable and dear Madam, I have learned you were awarded the Jan Karski prize for Valor and Courage. Please accept my hearty congratulations and respect for your extraordinarily brave activities in the years of occupation, when - disregarding your own security - you were saving many children from extermination, and rendering humanitarian assistance to human beings who needed spiritual and material aid. Having been yourself afflicted with physical tortures and spiritual sufferings you did not break down, but still unsparingly served others, co-creating homes for children and adults. For those deeds of goodness for others, let the Lord God in his goodness reward you with special graces and blessing. Remaining with respect and gratitude I give the Apostolic Benediction to you.

I'm no expert on Ms Sendler but my instinct all the same is to dislike the sobriquet, the Female Schindler. I can appreciate its journalistic and didactic utility in light of Stephen Spielberg's film masterpiece but my guess is she probably saved more lives than Oskar Schindler (not that it's a contest) and she had no status as an industrialist to shield her work. When she was caught she was tortured. Perhaps it would be fairer to say the great Schindler was the Male Sendler. Anyway, in a world that praises the heroism of a footballer playing with a chipped collarbone, it really is a grace to be reminded of what actual heroism looks like and also what it entails: namely, choosing what is right no matter what the price. I ask myself: would I have measured up to Ms Sendler's standards? Would I have defied the Gestapo on a daily basis? Would I, like her, have refused to talk as torturers broke my legs? The answers don't come easily. Good people can only be morally kindred to such heroes of history while hoping the world never presents them or their children with a chance to find out for real - the hard way.