A 97-year-old woman credited with saving Jewish children during the Holocaust is a hero who deserves the Nobel Peace Prize, Poland's president said Wednesday during a ceremony to honour Irena Sendler.

Sendler, who lives in a nursing home in Warsaw, was too frail to attend the special session of the Polish Senate, which unanimously approved a resolution honouring her and the underground Council for Assisting Jews, known as Zegota.

The group's members, mostly Roman Catholics, risked their lives during the operation in Nazi-occupied Poland, where concealing Jews was punishable by death.

Sendler was cited for organizing the "rescue of the most defenceless victims of the Nazi ideology — the Jewish children."

Polish President Lech Kaczynski called Sendler a "great hero who can be justly named for the Nobel Peace Prize."

"I think she's a great lady, very courageous, and I think she's a model for the whole international community," Israeli Ambassador David Peleg said after the ceremony. "I think that her courage is a very special one."

Sendler used her position in Warsaw's Social Welfare Department to frequently visit the city's ghetto, delivering clothing, medicine and money to Jews. Leading a team of about 20, she helped smuggle 2,500 Jewish children out of the ghetto, placing them with Polish families, convents or orphanages.

She wrote their names, along with the names of their parents, in small jars and buried them in the backyards of friends' houses in the hope the children could one day be reunited with their families.

Sendler was captured in 1943 and tortured by the Nazis at Warsaw's Pawiak prison, but didn't give any information to her captors. On the day she was to be executed, her colleagues bribed a Nazi guard and she was freed. Officially, she was listed on public bulletin boards as among those executed and she lived in hiding for the rest of the Nazi occupation of Poland.

In 1965, Israel's Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial awarded her one of its first medals for non-Jews who risked their lives to save Jews during the Holocaust, giving her the title "Righteous Among the Nations." She actually received the honour in 1983, after Poland's Communist authorities finally agreed to allow her to travel abroad.

With files from the Associated Press