Warsaw Ghetto Angel is not a biblical or mythological figure. It is the nickname known to the world for Irena Sendler, extraordinary woman that faced the German Nazis and secretly saved 2,500 Jewish children from being killed in the extermination camps in occupied Poland.

This nurse headed a group of 20 women which risked their lives to help children hiding them among Polish families, convents and orphanages between 1940 and 1943.

The Second World War was devastating Europe at the time accompanied by the Imperial appetite and the atrocities of Adolf Hitler and Irene meanwhile was able to get authorization to work in a Warsaw ghetto.

The job was only a pretext to carry out her risky task. She would hide small children at the bottom of a tool box and had a sack behind her truck to hide the larger ones. She also had a dog which was trained to bark when Nazi soldiers warning her that they were approaching.

This was how Irene was able to save thousands of children until the day the Nazis caught her. The Germans surprised her and on October 20th 1943 she was detained and taken to the Pawiak prison where she was brutally tortured. However, Irene never surrendered information on where she hid the children.

She registered the names of all those she saved and hid them in a glass bottle buried under a tree in her garden.

At the end of the war, Irene attempted to search for their parents but the majority of them were killed in the gas chambers. The children that survived were adopted by other families.

Irene, Warsaw Ghetto Angel was born on February 15th, 1910 and died in 2008 at the age of 98.

The condemnation to the genocide is more than enough reason to commemorate a day dedicated to the victims. The United Nations proclaimed January 27th of each year World Day in Memory of the Victims of the Holocaust.

On that day in 1945, the Soviet Army freed the largest Nazi concentration camp that ever existed in Auschwithz-Birkenau, Poland. By Dai Liem Lafá Armenteros