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.
In the early 1950s polio terrified American parents. In the last years before a vaccine, it paralyzed somewhere between 13,000 and 20,000 children every year. Jonas Salk developed a vaccine, and on April 12, 1955, the news came out that it was safe and effective. That same day, television newsman Edward R. Murrow asked Salk who owned the patent. “Well, the people, I would say,” Salk answered. “There is no patent. Could you patent the sun?” Historians point out that a patent may not have been possible anyway, but Salk’s answer captured a spirit that people still quote. He seemed far more interested in kids walking than in getting rich.
In 1979 a teenager named Jadav Payeng started planting trees on barren land on Majuli, an island in the Brahmaputra River in Assam, India. He just kept planting, year after year, one seedling at a time. It took close to 30 years, but the barren land became a lush forest of about 550 hectares, more than 1,300 acres. Today it shelters birds, deer, and even elephants and tigers. In 2010 he was honored as the Forest Man of India. He gives credit to the birds, cows, deer, wind, water, and elephants that helped spread the seeds, but it started with one young man and a lot of patient work.
