Irena's children: the extraordinary story of the woman who saved 2,500 children from the Warsaw ghetto

In 1942, a social worker, Irena Sendler, was granted access to the Warsaw ghetto as a public health specialist. While she was there she started smuggling children out, convincing her friends and neighbours to hide them. With the help of a network of local tradesmen, ghetto residents and her future husband, Adam Celnikier, Irena smuggled thousands of children past the Nazis. She made dangerous trips through the city's sewers, hid children in coffins, snuck them under overcoats at checkpoints, and slipped them through secret passages in abandoned buildings. But Irena did something even more astonishing at immense personal risk: she kept a secret list buried in bottles under an old apple tree in a friend's back garden. On it were the names and true identities of these Jewish children, recorded so their families could find them after the war.