There are seniors whose stories are such a testimony to courage of conviction and selfless heroics that their passing cannot go without mention. Irena Sendler was a Catholic social worker in Poland who, at great risk to her own life, led the rescue of 2,500 Jewish children from the Warsaw Ghetto during the Holocaust in World War II. She was eventually discovered and tortured, and she barely escaped a death sentence.

The 98-year-old Sendler died on May 12, 2008, in her native Warsaw, Poland. Her deeds would have gone unnoticed were it not for four girls half a world away, at a rural Kansas high school with no Jewish students, who wrote a play about her.

The teenagers—Megan Stewart, Elizabeth Cambers, Jessica Shelton, and Sabrina Coons—were looking for a subject for the Kansas State National History Day competition in 1999. Their teacher, Norm Conard, handed them a five-year-old news clipping that said, “Irena Sendler saved 2,500 children from the Warsaw Ghetto in 1942–43.” Conard thought this was a typographical error: perhaps 250 was meant instead of 2,500, since no one had ever heard of her. He encouraged the girls to investigate and unearth the true story. They began to reconstruct Sendler’s life, eventually turning it into a short play, Life in a Jar.