I was cruising the blogosphere and came across a link to this story about a Polish woman named Irena Sendler.

She saved 2,500 children from the Holocaust by smuggling them out of the Warsaw Ghetto in Poland.

Interesting, isn’t it, how close her name is to Schindler?

According to that story about her that I linked you to, she’s still alive–97 years old.

Here is a website created by the girls who, as part of a school report in 1999, unearthed the details of Irena’s life and the risks she took. What started as a class project for three high school girls has grown over the years into an organization with a bold mission: to “repair the world.” The girls, now grown women, announced on the site that Irena was nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize this year. Al Gore and the United Nations Council on Climate Change scooped her.

When Irena was only 7 years old, her father told her on his deathbed, “If you see someone drowning you must try to rescue them, even if you cannot swim.”

During WWII, she saw people, Jewish families, some were friends and neighbors, trapped behind fences, basically drowning, on their way to certain death. She tried to rescue as many children as possible, smuggling some into orphanages in bags of donated clothing, placing others in Christian homes, changing their names, but always keeping records of their original names and families. She stored the names in a jar that was buried in her neighbor’s yard.

After the war, she dug up the jar and used those precious slips of paper to try to track down the children and their families, devoting years to reuniting as many children as possible with their families.

She’s not the only brave sole who took enormous risks in Poland during the war, but her story touched me.

I can see how she could inspire people to aim so high that they seek to repair the world.

She lived out her father’s wisdom during a desperate, dangerous time.

Would I have the strength and courage to do the same?