The Ten O'Clock Scholar: Al Gore vs. Irena Sendler

Photo by Mariusz Kubik (open source).

Irena Sendler, born February 10, 1910, died on May 12, 2008.

Have you heard of her?

Have you heard of Al Gore?

From wikipedia, a few facts:

During World War II, she was a member of the Polish Underground and the Żegota Polish anti-Holocaust resistance in Warsaw. She helped save 2,500 Jewish children from the Warsaw Ghetto by providing them with false documents and sheltering them in individual and group children's homes outside the ghetto.
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Helping Jews was very risky—in German-occupied Poland, all household members risked the death sentence if they were found to be hiding any Jews, a more severe punishment than in other occupied European countries.
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As an employee of the Social Welfare Department, she had a special permit to enter the Warsaw Ghetto, to check for signs of typhus, something the Nazis feared would spread beyond the ghetto.
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She organized the smuggling of Jewish children from the ghetto, carrying them out in boxes, suitcases and trolleys. Under the pretext of conducting inspections of sanitary conditions during a typhoid outbreak, Sendler visited the ghetto and smuggled out babies and small children in ambulances and trams, sometimes disguising them as packages.
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The children were placed with Polish families, the Warsaw orphanage of the Sisters of the Family of Mary or Roman Catholic convents such as the Little Sister Servants of the Blessed Virgin Mary Conceived Immaculate at Turkowice and Chotomów. Some were smuggled to priests in parish rectories.

She hid lists of their names in jars in order to keep track of their original and new identities. Żegota assured the children that, when the war was over, they would be returned to Jewish relatives.

In 1943, Sendler was arrested by the Gestapo, severely tortured, and sentenced to death. Żegota saved her by bribing German guards on the way to her execution. She was left in the woods, unconscious, with broken arms and legs. She was listed on public bulletin boards as among those executed. For the remainder of the war, she lived in hiding, but continued her work for the Jewish children.

After the war, she dug up the jars containing the children's identities and attempted to find the children and return them to living parents. However, almost all the parents had been murdered at the Treblinka extermination camp.
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After the war, she was at first persecuted by the communist authorities, for the "crime" of being related to the Polish government in exile and association with the Armia Krajowa resistance. She was imprisoned, miscarried her second child, and her children were denied the right to study at a university.

In 1965, Sendler was recognized by Yad Vashem as one of the Righteous Among the Nations, which was confirmed in 1983 by the Israeli Supreme Court. She also was awarded the Commanders Cross by the Israeli Institute. It was only that year that the Polish communist government allowed her to travel abroad, to receive the award in Israel.

In 2003, Pope John Paul II sent a personal letter to Sendler, praising her wartime efforts. On 10 October 2003, Irena Sendler received the Order of the White Eagle, Poland's highest civilian decoration. She was also awarded the Jan Karski Award "For Courage and Heart," given by the American Center of Polish Culture in Washington, D.C.. On 14 March 2007 Sendler was honored by Poland's Senate.