Oscar duo star on Hallmark

THE COURAGEOUS HEART OF IRENA SENDLER. 9 p.m. Sunday, Channel 3.

Hollywood's preference for Holocaust stories with Gentile heroes takes nothing away from the Hallmark Hall of Fame's presentation of "The Courageous Heart of Irena Sendler," which premieres on CBS Sunday.

Anna Paquin ("True Blood") stars as Sendler, a Polish social worker whose plan to smuggle Jewish children out of the Warsaw ghetto and place them with Christian families saved some 2,500 lives, while nearly costing her own. Like all such stories, it serves as a reminder of the obligations humanity confers on us all.

But story aside, it's not every Sunday night you get the chance to see two Oscar-winning actresses - Paquin and Marcia Gay Harden - together on network TV. "ER's" Goran Visnjic supplies a bit of romance, but it's Sendler's determined decency that drives the story.

And as Harden, who plays Sendler's mother tells her, "Believe me, in this world, to do decency is not so bad." *

- Ellen Gray