Irena Sendlerowa, rescuer

She'd already been honoured, as Righteous Among the Nations, by Yad Vashem. Now Irena Sendlerowa, who helped save Jewish children from the Warsaw ghetto, has been honoured as a national hero by the Polish parliament.

Mrs Sendlerowa, who is in a Warsaw nursing home, insisted she did nothing special.

In an interview she said: "I was brought up to believe that a person must be rescued when drowning, regardless of religion and nationality."

"The term 'hero' irritates me greatly. The opposite is true. I continue to have pangs of conscience that I did so little."

That is, in fact, a common emphasis among the rescuers: to insist that what they did was not heroic, it was a simple duty which anyone should have recognized. Here's the same sentiment from another (Dutch) rescuer, Arnold Douwes:

You could do nothing else; it's as simple as that. It was obvious. When you see injustice done you do something against it... [T]hey were persecuted people and you had to help them.

The big question is why it is that what seems elementary to people like Irena Sendlerowa and Arnold Douwes strikes many more as exceptional and heroic. Is it that the rescuers are more courageous? But many of them confess to having been afraid. Still, they felt they could do no other.