Overview: The Courageous Heart of Irena Sendler is a 2009 television film directed by John Kent Harrison. The film is a co-production between United States and Poland companies. The teleplay by Harrison and Lawrence John Spagnola, based on the 2005 biography The Mother of the Holocaust Children by Anna Mieszkowska, focuses on Irena Sendler, a Polish social worker who smuggled approximately 2,500 Jewish children to safety during World War II. The Hallmark Hall of Fame production, which was filmed on location in Riga, Latvia, was broadcast by CBS on April 19, 2009, and released to DVD in Hallmark Gold Crown stores in early June of that year.