A Nobel Prize for peace - and image

Haaretz ^ | 11/09/2006 | Yossi Melman

[lizol]

A Nobel Prize for peace - and image

By Yossi Melman

Last Update: 11/09/2006 12:39

In 1942, in the midst of World War Two, Irena Sendler secretly packed a few Jewish children into an ambulance and smuggled them out of the Warsaw Ghetto. In the front passenger seat, next to the driver, she put a dog, whose loud barking drowned out the crying children. Throughout the war, Sendler worked to save Jewish children - 2,500 in total.

In an interview she gave in 1995 to Jewish-French writer and filmmaker Marek Halter, she said she regretted only one thing: "I could have done more," she said tearfully. "This feeling of regret will accompany me until my dying day."

Now, Polish president Lech Kaczynski, in Israel this week, is trying to change Poland's image in the eyes of Israelis, many of whom believe the country's residents helped the Nazis to exterminate Jews. Through the initiative Kaczynski is proposing both countries back a Nobel Peace Prize nomination for Sendler, now 96 years old.

However, the proposal may face opposition from an unexpected place: Yad Vashem.

Irena Sendler was born in 1910. Her socialist-leaning father was a doctor in Otwock. Most of his patients were Jews from the town, located 20 kilometers southeast of Warsaw. When World War Two broke out, Irena Sendler began helping the Jews of the town even before the Nazis established the Warsaw ghetto. She helped set up soup kitchens for the poor, for orphans and for homeless Jews whose property and bank accounts had been appropriated by the Nazis.

[lizol]

Irena Sendler - candidate for Peace Nobel Prize