WARSAW

A WOMAN credited with saving about 2500 Jewish children from the Nazi Holocaust by smuggling them out of the Warsaw Ghetto died yesterday, aged 98.

Irena Sendler, who was among the first to be honoured by Israel's Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial for her wartime heroism, was a 29-year-old city social worker when Germany invaded Poland in September 1939, launching the Second World War. Warsaw's Jews were forced into a walled ghetto.

Seeking to save the children, Sendler masterminded risky rescue operations. Under the pretext of inspecting sanitary conditions during a typhoid outbreak, she and her assistants ventured into the ghetto and smuggled out babies and small children in ambulances and in trams, sometimes wrapped up as packages.

Records show that Sendler's team of about 20 saved nearly 2500 children from October 1940 and April 1943, when the Nazis burned the ghetto, shooting residents or sending them to death camps.

"Every child saved with my help and the help of all the wonderful secret messengers, who today are no longer living, is the justification of my existence on this earth, and not a title to glory," Sendler said in 2007.

President Lech Kaczynski, who led a campaign to nominate Sendler for the Nobel Peace Prize, called her "extremely brave".-AP