Irena Sendler was a Polish social worker in German-occupied Warsaw when she began helping Jewish families trapped inside the ghetto. She entered under the pretense of inspecting for disease, carrying medicine, food, and most dangerously, possibilities. Getting children out often meant convincing parents to hand them to a stranger, perhaps forever, on the slim hope that forever might still exist.
Babies were carried out in toolboxes and sacks. Older children left through courthouses, ambulances, sewers, and secret passages. Sendler and her network found false papers and hiding places in convents, orphanages, and private homes. She wrote the children's real names and new identities on slips of paper, sealed them in jars, and buried them so families might be reunited if the war ever ended.
The Gestapo arrested and tortured her in 1943, breaking her legs and feet, but she gave up no names. Members of the Polish underground bribed a guard and saved her from execution. Roughly 2,500 children survived because of the network she helped lead. Sendler's courage was not theatrical. It was administrative, secretive, exhausting, and sustained, which is often the exact form courage must take to keep people alive.