Irena Sendler, a Polish woman who helped smuggle more than 2,500 Jewish children out of the Warsaw Ghetto, occasionally hiding them in sacks so that they would not be found and killed by German guards, has died aged 98 after a long illness.

As a social worker, Sendler had access to the Ghetto, ostensibly to help fight the spread of typhus. In reality, together with about two-dozen co-conspirators from the Zegota Polish underground organisation that tried to help the Jews, she tried to rescue Jewish children from certain death either in the Ghetto or in the concentration camps.