50 Underrated Women You Never Learned About In History Class

47. Irena Sendler. She smuggled dozens of babies out of the Jewish Ghetto in Warsaw, Poland. She would write down their names and keep them in a jar, then using her job as a Social Worker would make them fake papers and place the children in orphanages, willing Polish families, convents, and just about anywhere else where they would be safe. She was eventually caught by the Gestapo and withstood torture to keep the names and locations of those children safe, and was sentenced to death but luckily managed to escape thanks to some last-minute bribery. During the end of the war she worked as a nurse under a different name, and was even shot at one point by a German-deserter looking for food.

When the war ended she became the head of the department of Social Welfare in Warsaw, and set about trying to reunite all the children she had saved with their parents (most of which had been sadly executed in the Treblinka Concerntration Camp), and those which she couldn’t get united with their parents she smuggled to Israel so they could at least be safe out of Poland.

After that she continued to have a few high state positions, as well as be deputy director of two medical schools in Warsaw.

She died in 2008.