Helped save thousands from the Holocaust

Irena Sendler — credited with saving nearly 2,500 Jewish children from the Nazi Holocaust by smuggling them out of the Warsaw, Poland, ghetto, some of them in baskets — died Monday, her family said. She was 98.

Sendler, among the first to be honored by Israel’s Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial as a Righteous Among the Nations for her wartime heroism, died at a Warsaw hospital, daughter Janina Zgrzembska said.

Sendler was a 29-year-old social worker with the city’s welfare department when Germany invaded Poland in September 1939, launching World War II. Warsaw’s Jews were forced into a walled-off ghetto.

Seeking to save the ghetto’s children, Sendler masterminded risky rescue operations. Under the pretext of inspecting sanitary conditions during a typhoid outbreak, she and her assistants ventured inside the ghetto — and smuggled out babies and small children in ambulances and in trams, sometimes wrapped up as packages. Teenagers escaped by joining teams of workers forced to labor outside the ghetto. They were placed in families, orphanages, hospitals or convents.

Records show that Sendler’s team of about 20 people saved nearly 2,500 children from the Warsaw ghetto between October 1940 and its final liquidation in April 1943, when the Nazis burned the ghetto, shooting the 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 in a letter.

In hopes of one day uniting the children with their families — most of whom perished in the Nazis’ death camps — Sendler wrote the children’s real names on slips of paper she kept at home.

When German police came to arrest her in 1943, an assistant hid the slips, which Sendler later buried in a jar under an apple tree in an associate’s yard. Nearly 2,500 names were recorded.

The Nazis took Sendler to the notorious Pawiak prison, which few people left alive. Gestapo agents tortured her repeatedly, leaving her with scars — but she refused to betray her team. Zegota, an underground organization helping Jews, paid a bribe to German guards to free her.

After World War II, Sendler worked as a social welfare official and director of vocational schools, continuing to assist some of the children she rescued.

• DIANA BARNATO WALKER

Heiress, noted aviator

Diana Barnato Walker, an heiress to a South African diamond-mining fortune who took up flying in the 1930s and became a celebrated aviator as one of a group of women who delivered new fighters and bombers to combat squadrons in World War II, died April 28. She was 90.

Her son, Barney Walker, said she died in a hospital near her sheep farm in Surrey, England, and that the cause was pneumonia.

Walker was 18 when she discovered her calling in 1936. Seeking a break from the social whirl of a debutante in London, she took a flying lesson in a Tiger Moth biplane and never turned back.

In 1941, after serving as a nursing auxiliary with the British expeditionary force, she passed rigorous tests and became a member of what The Times of London described in 2005 as “the pluckiest sisterhood in military history,” the women’s arm of the Air Transport Auxiliary. Just over 5 feet tall, Walker often needed a cushion to allow her to reach the controls of the aircraft she flew.

Known as the “Atagirls,” the transport auxiliary pilots joined 500 male pilots in delivering many aircraft to squadrons across Britain. Walker flew Spitfire, Hurricane and Mustang fighters, as well as bombers. Twice the unarmed planes she was flying were attacked by German aircraft, and she emerged uninjured.

Born Jan. 15, 1918, Diana Barnato Walker was the daughter of Woolf Barnato, a London-based financier who won the Le Mans 24-hour race in France three times.

In 1944, she married another Spitfire pilot, Derek Walker, and flew alongside him, each in a Spitfire, to a honeymoon in Brussels, Belgium. He was killed in a flying accident six months after the war ended in 1945.

She subsequently began a 30-year relationship with Whitney Straight, an American-born graduate of Cambridge University who was a grand prix racing driver and a Battle of Britain fighter ace. Barney Walker, her survivor, is their son.

In 1963, at age 45, she became the first British woman to fly faster than sound when she piloted a two-seat RAF Lightning fighter at a speed of 1,262 miles an hour over the North Sea. That made her, briefly, holder of the world air speed record for women; it was broken in 1964 by Jacqueline Cochran Odlum.

• DR. ANNELLA BROWN

Pioneering surgeon, art collector

Dr. Annella Brown, a pioneering Boston surgeon and art collector, died of congestive heart failure April 13 at her home in Miami. She was 88.

A niece, Deborah C. Travers of Darien, Conn., said Brown was recruited to Massachusetts in 1949 by the New England Hospital for Women and Children. During that time, she said, Dr. Brown became the fifth nationally certified woman surgeon.

Dr. Brown often treated patients for cancer of the breast, colon and thyroid. She also was among the first physicians to use chemotherapy, Travers said.

She was born in Dublin, Ga., into a family “without means to speak of,” she once said. Her brother, Moody, of Lenox, Mass., said he considered her “a child prodigy. “She was 8 when she told our mother she was going to be a doctor, graduated from high school at 15 and from college at 18,” he said. “Then, because she couldn’t get into medical school until she was 21, she taught and coached basketball in high school in Cairo, Ga.”

She entered the University of Georgia Medical School and after two years transferred to Woman’s Medical College of Pennsylvania, graduating in 1944 summa cum laude. She interned at Philadelphia General Hospital and in 1945 moved to the Cleveland Clinic as the first woman surgical resident.

ALSO

• Hilda Silverman, a Jew who advocated for peace between Israelis and Palestinians, died May 5 in Mount Auburn Hospital in Cambridge, Mass. She was 69 and been diagnosed with leukemia several weeks earlier, not long after recovering from treatment for lymphoma.

Beginning by campaigning door-to-door for George McGovern in the 1972 presidential campaign, Silverman devoted most of her time to activism. Her circle of friends and contacts grew to span states and nations.

With a handful of peace activists, she met in 1987 with Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat, a brief gathering in Tunisia that drew the lasting enmity of many Jews and praise from those who thought it was necessary for Jews and Palestinians to exchange ideas.

From Wire Reports