Submitted Photo 98-year-old Irena Sendler earlier this month in Warsaw, Poland while being visited by students of Uniontown High School to celebrate her 98th birthday, and learn about her life.

The world lost one of its most courageous people Monday when Polish-born heroine and social worker Irena Sendler died at the age of 98 in a Warsaw, Poland hospital.

"We have lost a giant of the human race," Lowell Milken Center Director Norm Conard said. "She represented and still represents the best about our world. Also, we have lost a family member."

Conard is also a former teacher and director of "Life in a Jar," a student-driven project and dramatic play about Sendler, who rescued 2,500 Jewish children from Nazi Germans during World War II. The play is written and still performed by former and current Uniontown High School students who made Sendler the focus of a National History Day project in 1999, thus bringing the once-reclusive Sendler into the limelight.

Conard and the students had just returned May 4 from visiting Sendler in her native country to celebrate her 98th birthday, to promote her story, and to visit various spots where she saved children. They first visited Sendler in 2001, and most recently in 2005.

"One of the things she told the students, other than 'I love you,' was that 'you have changed my country, and you have changed your country,'" Conard said of Sendler after their trip last week.

Megan Felt, the program director at the Lowell Milken Center, is one of the original founders of the "Life in a Jar" project, and portrays Sendler in the play. Monday was also notable because it was Felt's birthday -- and a day when she and others lost a close friend and role model.

"My life has been forever touched by her testimony for good winning out over evil," Felt said. "Irena was more than a close friend, she was a role model for my life. Playing Irena Sendler in 'Life in a Jar' was the most powerful expression I could ever have."

Elizabeth (Cambers) Hutton, another one of the original project founders, echoed Felt's sentiments.

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"Irena touched my life in so many ways, at so many times," she said.

The student play is called "Life in a Jar" because Sendler would keep lists of the names of Jewish children and their adoptive families, and bury them in jars with plans to reunite them after the war was over. The project has grown considerably since the students discovered Sendler's story in 1999, and has been featured in several newspaper and magazine articles, and on various television and radio programs.

Born in Otwock, Poland, Sendler served as a social worker with the city's welfare department, masterminding the risky rescue operations of Jewish children from the Warsaw Ghetto during Nazi Germany's brutal World War II occupation.

Records show that Sendler's team of about 20 people saved nearly 2,500 children from the Warsaw Ghetto between October 1940 and April 1943, when the Nazis burned the ghetto, shooting the residents or sending them to death camps. After World War II, Sendler worked as a social welfare official and director of vocational schools, continuing to assist some of the children she rescued.

In 1965, Sendler became one of the first so-called Righteous Gentiles honored by the Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial in Jerusalem for wartime heroics. Poland's communist leaders at that time would not allow her to travel to Israel; she collected the award in 1983. She was nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize for her heroic efforts more than 60 years ago.

Sendler had been hospitalized since last month with pneumonia. She lived most of her life in Warsaw. A funeral and memorial service for Sendler is planned for Thursday or Friday, Conard said.

More information about Sendler's life and legacy can be found online at www.irenasendler.org.