Irena Sendler was a Christian Polish woman who rescued thousands of Jewish children during WWII. The emotion-filled, narrative-style text includes invented dialogue and attribution of thoughts and feelings; these inserted "fly-on-the-wall" moments were "based on the archives and historical sources," and an adapter's note and copious endnotes provide details. Photographs are interspersed, adding personal faces to the horrifying history. (c) Copyright 2017. The Horn Book, Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

Raoul Wallenberg and Oskar Schindler have become synonymous with saving Jews during the Holocaust. Irena Sendler, a Polish social worker, deserves to be mentioned in the same breath. As the leader of the children's section of the underground organization Zegota, the Catholic and avowedly socialist Sendler snatched some 2,500 young souls from the Nazis. In the beginning, she and approximately two dozen compatriots falsified documents, fudged statistics and exaggerated reports of communicable diseases - all to obscure the identities of potential victims and secure resources to keep them alive. Then, as the Warsaw ghetto was annihilated, the efforts involved literal escapes, the dwindling few sometimes being smuggled out amid dirty linen or in coffins. The Gestapo caught up with Sendler in 1943, but she didn't break under torture. En route to her execution, her guard told her, "You lousy thug, get lost" and punched her in the mouth: Her cohort had arranged her rescue by bribing him. Sendler survived the war, dying in 2008 at the age of 98, honored with Israeli recognition as Righteous Among the Nations, personal praise from Pope John Paul II and Poland's highest civilian decoration, the Order of the White Eagle. Of the many revelations in this incredible account, one that stands out is Sendler's potentially fatal recordkeeping. It was partly a matter of pure accounting; her monthly budget amounted to about $750,000 today, and, as she said of these sums, it was essential "to prove that they had been received by those for whom they were destined." Far more important was her meticulous notation of the identities of the children, scrawled in the hope - almost entirely vain, it turned out - that they could reconnect with their families after the war. But Sendler herself later met many of them, and several were at her deathbed. She was, one witness said, "the brightest star in the black sky of the occupation." THOMAS VINCIGUERRA is the author of "Cast of Characters: Wolcott Gibbs, E.B. White, James Thurber, and the Golden Age of The New Yorker."

Gr 6-10-Irena Sendler, a righteous Gentile who rescued approximately 2,500 Jewish children in the Warsaw ghetto, is the focus of this volume. Sendler's father, a Catholic doctor who treated Jews others turned away, grew up speaking Yiddish with close Jewish friends. Her senior role at a government agency positioned her to offer help following the 1939 Nazi invasion of Poland. Sendler and an inner circle of trusted friends, Jewish and Christian alike, used creative means to spirit Jewish children away to safety in orphanages and foster homes. Tortured by the Nazis, she gave up no secrets, keeping the children and her network safe. While the book is strong on general historical context, featuring descriptions of socioeconomic divisions among Jews in occupied Warsaw, it suffers from the wartime loss of direct historical evidence. Many of the individuals portrayed-Sendler included-do not feel fully fleshed out, making the narrative somewhat confusing and lessening the emotional impact. This is a story better suited to shorter treatments, such as Marcia Vaughan's Irena's Jars of Secrets. More readable, engaging volumes on similar individuals exist, such as Irene Gut Opdyke's In My Hands and Alison Leslie Gold's A Special Fate. VERDICT Purchase where there is a high demand for Holocaust nonfiction.-Laura Simeon, Open Window School Library, WA © Copyright 2016. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

Farrell adapts Mazzeo's adult book for young readers, recounting the inspiring true story of Polish social worker Irena Sendler, who risked her life to save 2,500 Jewish children in the Warsaw ghetto from the Nazis during WWII. Between 1939 through 1945, ghetto inhabitants increasingly died of disease and starvation and were deported to extermination camps. In the midst of these horrific living conditions, Sendler and a small group of mostly female Jewish friends falsified Jewish children's paperwork, giving them Catholic identities, and ingeniously smuggled them out of the ghetto under overcoats, in coffins and toolboxes, and through underground sewers and tunnels. Known as the female Oskar Schindler, Sendler was arrested and interrogated by the Nazis but never broke under torture. She was short in stature but had immense courage and didn't consider herself a hero: What I did was not an extraordinary thing. The children Sendler saved and the readers of this moving biography would undoubtedly disagree. Final photos and endnotes not seen.--Rawlins, Sharon Copyright 2016 Booklist