In the summer of 1940, Chiune Sugihara was a Japanese diplomat in Kovno, Lithuania, when Jewish refugees from Poland began crowding outside his consulate. Many of them held questionable visas to the Dutch island of Curacao, and they needed permission to pass through Japan to get out of Europe. With no clear instructions from Tokyo, Sugihara decided to help. He wrote transit visas for hundreds and hundreds of people, and before his consulate closed that fall he even gave visas to refugees who lacked proper travel papers. Tokyo sent a cable reminding him of the rules. He kept going. In 1984, Yad Vashem honored him as Righteous Among the Nations.
On November 14, 1960, a six-year-old named Ruby Bridges walked into William Frantz Elementary School in New Orleans escorted by U.S. marshals. She was the first Black child to enter an all-white school in the South. People threw objects at her. One woman held up a Black doll in a little wooden coffin. Many white parents kept their kids home, so Ruby spent first grade alone with her teacher, Barbara Henry, a white woman from Boston. Ruby ate her own lunch from home because of fear of poisoning, and her mother lost her job. Through all of it, Ruby never missed a day of school. Years later she said of her teacher, “She showed me her heart.”
In the early 1980s in Perth, Australia, a young doctor named Barry Marshall teamed up with pathologist Robin Warren, who had spotted curved bacteria in stomach biopsies. Marshall became convinced those bacteria caused stomach ulcers. Nearly everybody said that was impossible. His papers were rejected, his results were doubted, and he was told the bacteria were harmless. He couldn’t get an animal to catch the infection, so he used himself. He drank the bacteria, got sick, and a biopsy proved the infection and the damage to his stomach. Years of patient work followed, and in 1994 a major medical meeting agreed that the treatment for ulcers was getting rid of the bacteria. In 2005 he and Warren won the Nobel Prize.
