Irena Sendler: In the Name of Their Mothers

At 95, Irena Sendler tells the remarkable story of a group of young Polish women who risked their lives to save thousands of Jewish children from the Warsaw ghetto during World War II. Sendler was a 33-year-old social worker in Warsaw in 1943 when she was captured and tortured by the Gestapo. By then she and her liaisons had hidden over 2,500 Jewish children from the Warsaw ghetto. When Sendler refused to divulge anything about their underground operation, she was sentenced to death. She escaped on the day she was to be executed, thanks to help from the Polish Resistance. Most of the hidden children survived the war and many were later reunited with their Jewish families. But for decades in Communist Poland, neither the children nor their wartime caretakers could tell their stories. This film features the last interviews Irena Sendler gave before she died in 2008 at the age of 98, along with her co-workers and the children they saved.