In the summer of 1944, nearly 200,000 Jews were still left in Budapest, and the authorities planned to deport them too. Raoul Wallenberg, a Swedish businessman with no diplomatic experience at all, arrived on July 9 as a diplomat at the Swedish legation. He started handing out certificates of protection that put Jews under neutral Sweden’s care. He set up hospitals, nurseries, a soup kitchen, and more than 30 safe houses. When thousands were forced on marches toward the Austrian border, Wallenberg often went in person to get people with papers pulled out of the columns. When Budapest was liberated, more than 100,000 Jews were still alive there, mostly because of him and his colleagues. God can use someone who feels unqualified. He just needs someone willing to show up.
In 1928, Scottish scientist Alexander Fleming was working in his London lab when he noticed something odd. A mold had accidentally grown on one of his culture plates of staphylococcus bacteria, and around the mold there was a clear circle where the bacteria had died. Plenty of people would have thrown the dish out as spoiled. Fleming got curious instead. He experimented and found that the mold stopped the bacteria even when diluted 800 times. He named the active substance penicillin. It took years and other scientists to turn it into a usable medicine, but in 1945 Fleming shared the Nobel Prize, and penicillin went on to save countless lives.
Norman Borlaug grew up on a farm near Cresco, Iowa. In 1944 he took a job in Mexico directing a wheat research program, and he spent years in the fields crossing and testing wheat varieties. In time he developed high-yielding, short-strawed, disease-resistant wheat. Then he worked to get the new wheat planted in Mexico, India, Pakistan, and many other countries, and the harvests were huge. His work became the heart of what people call the Green Revolution. In 1970 he received the Nobel Peace Prize. He called his success only a temporary win in the war against hunger, and he kept training young scientists from around the world.
On September 24, 1988, Canadian sailor Lawrence Lemieux was racing in the Finn class at the Seoul Olympics and was on course to finish second in that day’s race. The wind had kicked up to about 35 knots when he spotted a capsized boat on a nearby course. Two Singapore sailors, Shaw Her Siew and Joseph Chan, were in the water. Siew was clinging to the hull, and Chan, badly hurt, was about 20 meters away. Lemieux turned his boat around, dragged Chan aboard, rescued Siew, and held his boat against the wind until a Korean Navy boat arrived. His medal hopes were gone, but the IOC honored him with the Pierre de Coubertin medal for sportsmanship.
