When the Germans invaded Poland in the early days of World War II, Irena Sendlerowa was a brilliant, beautiful young social worker who easily could have distanced herself from danger. Instead she quickly became involved in the resistance, and in the rescue of thousands of Jewish children facing certain doom in the Warsaw ghetto.

At first, author Tilar J. Mazzeo states that it seemed the invaders had more hatred of the rebellious Poles than of the country's Jews. But all that changed when, in 1939, the Nazi regime with Hitler's full support laid out a plan for the "final solution" --- the obliteration of all Jewish people from the face of the earth. Irena and her politically active coterie began to smuggle: forming a group known as Zegota, Irena became especially adept at smuggling money, identity papers and, poignantly, even hand-carved dolls into the Jewish ghetto, and children out. A Catholic in love with a Jewish man, Irena managed to keep her lover, Adam, from discovery as well.

"...a taut, dramatic account of the nearly inconceivable bravery of Irena Sendler and those who worked with her to protect and save children in wartime."

To hide the children for a few days at a time before moving them to greater safety, she called on college friends and family. She and her fellow operatives walked them out through the labyrinthine sewers or hid them in ambulances, even in their own clothing. The risks were high, and Irena took it on herself to increase her own personal peril by keeping a list of names of every child that Zegota brought to safety, carefully written on tissue papers. By this means, she believed, once the war was over, the children could be reunited with their parents, not realizing that nearly all of the 2,500 little ones she saved would lose their parents to the death camps.

When Irena was arrested and taken to the notorious Aleja Szucha prison, she was sure it was her death sentence. She was relentlessly tortured and questioned, but never relented from repeating the cover story that she and her Zegota allies had agreed upon. Each morning there were executions; it was only a matter of time before she would be shot. Of all the memories of those terrifying, inhuman times, including the daily beatings and murders in Aleja Szucha, Irena would later say that "not one left a greater impression on me" than the day she and her comrades watched helplessly as the residents of a Jewish orphanage were marched to the railway siding where they would be shoved into cars on a train bound for certain extermination. The orphanage's doctor, Janusz Korczak, walked with his charges in the sweltering heat. They sang as they were herded along, until all were on board the death train, including the heroic doctor.

This is necessarily a harrowing story, with minute-by-minute dangers piling up on the Zegota zealots, the selections and roundups increasing in number and intensity (by 1942, two trains a day left Warsaw for Treblinka, carrying a cargo of 12,000 each). Resistance fighters struggled to find a route of escape not just for Jewish children and families, but for themselves. Miraculously, Irena was one of the survivors. On the morning she was slated to be executed, she was mysteriously set free from Aleja Szucha, wounded and penniless but alive. She would live to be nearly 100, through and past the Cold War. Her story finally came to light in Poland, and she received the same honor accorded to Oskar Schindler, named "Righteous Among the Nations" by the Israeli Holocaust memorial organization.

Mazzeo has added to the researched materials her own conception of the character's inner thoughts, constructing a taut, dramatic account of the nearly inconceivable bravery of Irena Sendler and those who worked with her to protect and save children in wartime.