I’d never heard of Irena Sendler until I saw this article:
Heroine Who Saved 2,500 Children during Holocaust Dies at 98
From the article:
During the war, Sendler was a social worker and used her position to go into the ghetto and smuggle out children. Because the Nazis feared disease, she went into the ghetto under the pretext of trying to contain an outbreak of typhoid. According to the New York Times she and her team of volunteers, most of whom were women, rescued children through underground corridors, by smuggling them in coffins or under the floorboards in ambulances, or by paper forgeries in the Catholic church near the ghetto.
She was a real-life Scarlet Pimpernel. But, you know, even better.