Irena Sendler’s Children

When World War II broke out, Irena Sendler was a 29-year-old social worker in Warsaw. After the Nazis sealed some 400,000 Jews inside the ghetto, she got a permit to go in and inspect sanitary conditions, and she used it to help. Working with the underground group Zegota under the code name Jolanta, she and her partners smuggled Jewish children out and placed them in orphanages, convents, and with Polish families, keeping coded lists of where they were. In October 1943 the Gestapo arrested her. She was sentenced to death, but the underground bribed officials to set her free, and she went right back to work. Nobody knows exactly how many children she and her partners saved.

Eighty Strangers Form a Human Chain

On a Saturday evening in July 2017 at Panama City Beach, Florida, two young boys got caught in a powerful rip current. Before long their mother, their grandmother, and others were caught too, until nine people were struggling to stay afloat and gulping seawater. Derek Simmons and his wife Jessica, who had been having a family picnic, saw the trouble. Beachgoers started linking arms into the water, and soon about 80 strangers formed a chain stretching almost 100 yards. Simmons and his wife swam out on boogie boards and passed the swimmers back along the chain one by one. The grandmother had a heart attack in the water but survived. “It was a wave of humanity,” Simmons said.

Cliff Young Shuffles to Victory

In 1983 a 61-year-old potato farmer named Cliff Young lined up for the Sydney to Melbourne ultramarathon, about 875 kilometers, against some of the best ultramarathon runners in the world. He wore long pants and seemed to shuffle more than run, a style he built up running around his farm, sometimes in rubber boots because of the rain. Plenty of Australians laughed at him. The runners had an understanding that they’d sleep until dawn, but on the first night his team set the alarm wrong and Cliff woke just after 2 a.m. and kept going. He finished in 5 days, 14 hours, and 4 minutes, about 50 kilometers ahead of the next runner, and became a national folk hero.

The Little Ships of Dunkirk

In late May 1940, more than 300,000 British and French soldiers were trapped on the beaches at Dunkirk with the German army closing in. The beaches sloped so gently that big warships couldn’t get close, so the British Admiralty appealed to the owners of small boats for help. Small boats of all kinds crossed the Channel to ferry soldiers off the sand to the larger ships. Between May 26 and June 4, more than 338,000 men were rescued. Winston Churchill called it a miracle of deliverance. The rescue happened because ordinary people with ordinary boats answered the call.

Harriet Tubman Never Lost a Passenger

In 1849 Harriet Tubman learned that she was about to be sold, so she escaped slavery in Maryland and made it to freedom. Most people would have stayed safe up north. She went back. Over about ten years, in about thirteen separate trips, she slipped back into Maryland’s Eastern Shore and led around 70 people to freedom, including her brothers and their families, and gave instructions to dozens more. Abolitionists called her Moses. Years later, speaking at a convention in 1896, she said, “I was the conductor of the Underground Railroad for eight years, and I can say what most conductors can’t say: I never ran my train off the track and I never lost a passenger.”