When the Nazis invaded Warsaw in September 1939 Irena Sendler, a young Catholic woman, began helping the city’s Jews. When the ghetto was erected in 1940 her main concern became saving Jewish children.

At extreme personal risk, she forged documents and placed children in Christian homes. She documented everything and hid the records in a jar, which she buried in her garden.

Arrested and tortured by the Gestapo, who wanted her list, she never revealed her secrets and was sentenced to death but managed to escape.

After the war, using her recovered records, Mrs Sendler located “her” children and reunited many with their families. In 1965 she was declared one of the “Righteous Among the Nations” by the Israeli Holocaust commemoration organisation Yad Vashem, and in 1991 she was made an honorary citizen of Israel.

Now President Kaczynski of Poland has nominated Mrs Sendler — in her nineties and wheelchair-bound — for the Nobel Peace Prize. But Yad Vashem refuses its support, saying it “does not think that one of the Righteous . . . should be singled out for this recognition”.

Hopefully, the State of Israel will reject this appalling advice and support Mrs Sendler’s nomination to be given the prize on behalf of all those who risked their own lives to save Jewish ones.