Although it’s been more than six decades, the harrowing stories of the Holocaust as well as the heroic efforts of ordinary people in Nazi-occupied countries to save Jews from the gas chambers continue to unfold.

Martin Gilbert’s 2003 book, The Righteous: The Unsung Heroes of the Holocaust, related stories of people who hid Jews in attics, on farms and in churches. This book was recently translated into Italian, and at its publication about a month ago Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, the Vatican secretary of state, said the book illustrated how people of different faiths risked their lives to save Jews from Nazi persecution and death in concentration camps.

The names of some of these people, such as Oskar Schindler, are well known from the film, “Schindler’s List.” Others, such as Irena Sendler, a Catholic from Poland, are not so familiar — although more people might know of her heroic efforts now than before.

Sendler, now 97 and still living in Poland, was profiled last week on the ABC World News, and hers is a story worth repeating. This woman saved about 2,500 Jewish children from the Warsaw Ghetto by providing them with false documents and finding hiding places for them in homes and Catholic convents.

Working as part of the Polish underground, the ABC report said, Sendler organized 10 “care centers” in Warsaw staffed by volunteers. Their task was to provide midwives who would sneak into the ghetto to receive Jewish newborns and keep them in hiding until other places could be found to hide them.

“When the war started, all of Poland was drowning in a sea of blood, but most of all it affected the Jewish nation,” Sendler said in the TV report, “And within that nation it was the children who suffered most. That’s why we needed to give our hearts to them.”

Sendler said she is the only remaining survivor of the 30 or so people who worked with her. “Alone I couldn’t have done it,” she said. “It was 30 brave people.”

Sendler was a social worker, and as an employee of the Social Work Department she had a special permit to enter the Warsaw Ghetto. In the ghetto, she wore a Star of David as a sign of solidarity with the Jewish people and so as not to call attention to herself. But the Nazis eventually became aware of her activities, and in October 1943 she was arrested by the Gestapo, tortured, imprisoned and sentenced to death.

Her life was saved when members of the Zegota, a council to aid Jews, bribed the Germans to stop the execution. However, she continued working to help Jewish children under a false identity.

One of the children she saved, Elzbieta Ficowska, was six months old in 1942 when she was smuggled out of the ghetto in a pile of bricks. Her parents died in the death camps.

“Irena represents the often forgotten truth that no one should be indifferent,” Ficowska said on the ABC report. “Irena became a symbol, a symbol of something very good. ... In today’s world of eroding values in which role models crumble one after another, it’s particularly the young who need people like Mrs. Sendler.”

And it’s the young who are helping to keep Sendler’s story alive. In 1999, a high school teacher in Kansas encouraged some students — as part of a history project — to study the life of Sendler. They created a play about her life, called “Life in a Jar,” which has been presented more than 200 times in Kansas and in other parts of the country.

The play gets its name from a jar that Sendler buried under a tree in a garden. It contained a list of the names of the children who were saved.

Asked why she risked her life for the children, Sendler said in a 2003 U.S. News and World Report article: “I was taught by my father that when someone is drowning, you don’t ask if they can swim, you just jump in and help. During the war, everyone was drowning, but mostly Jewish children.”

She said on last week’s ABC report: “After the Second World War, it seemed that humanity understood something and that nothing similar would happen again. Humanity has understood nothing. Religious, tribal, national wars continue. The world seems to be in a sea of blood.”

But, she added, “The world can be better if there’s love, tolerance and humility.”

Perhaps this is the enduring lesson of Irena Sendler’s life. And it’s a lesson for us to live whenever racial or ethic prejudice or any form of intolerance and hatred raises its ugly head. We must not stand idly by and do nothing about it.