2 tales of quiet heroism

Heroism tends to be understood as a matter of public display – the bystander racing into a burning building, the soldier braving fire to rescue a comrade. But there is heroism, as well, of a quieter, more self-effacing variety – the unintentional hero, quiet but determined, who acts in the vacuum of others’ complacency.

This is a column about two such individuals.

The first, Nicholas Winton, died Wednesday at age 106. As a 29-year-old stockbroker in London, Winton was planning to go skiing in Switzerland in December 1938. Instead, he went to Prague to help refugees in the just-annexed Sudetenland. There, he confronted an obvious question that lacked an answer: “Who’s helping the children?”

So Winton appointed himself. He established – invented, actually – a “Children’s Section” of the British Committee for Refugees from Czechoslovakia, named himself honorary secretary and set to work meeting parents frantic to ship their children to safety, even at the risk of never seeing them again.

Winton cajoled British bureaucrats, forged travel documents, paid bribes to the Gestapo and found British families willing to take in the Jewish children. In the end, he managed to send eight trainloads of children, 669 in total, from Prague bound for London. A ninth, with 250 children on board, was stopped in Prague on Sept. 3, 1939, the day Britain declared war on Germany. None of those children was seen again.

Amazingly, Winton never mentioned his work – “just nine months in a very long life,” he said – to anyone. Including his wife, Grete, who stumbled on her husband’s secret when she found an old scrapbook in the attic more than four decades later and insisted that the story be told.

SECOND HERO

The second hero of this column may never forgive me for audaciously linking him with the first. He is David Bradley, the owner of the media company that publishes The Atlantic, and – full disclosure – both a friend and a benefactor: I am fortunate to be among a group of journalists that Bradley has welcomed to his home.

This week’s issue of The New Yorker magazine features a mesmerizing account by Lawrence Wright of Bradley’s behind-the-scenes efforts to help free Americans kidnapped in Syria. Tragically, Bradley’s efforts were less successful than Winton’s; four of the five hostages he sought to save were eventually killed.

Yet there are telling parallels between the two endeavors. As with Winton, Bradley’s involvement was both accidental and self-impelled. As with Winton, it illustrates the power of individual perseverance in the face not only of evil, but of bureaucratic obstacles and indifference.

Bradley’s effort began earlier, in 2011, before the wave of kidnappings, when freelancer Clare Gillis was captured in Libya along with two other reporters.

The abduction was not obviously Bradley’s problem, but the U.S. government was not involved in negotiating the journalists’ return. So Bradley, who made his fortune as a management consultant, got to work, drawing concentric circles on his office whiteboard to puzzle out who could help secure Gillis’ freedom.

Few of us have Winton’s or Bradley’s capacity for energetic determination; even fewer, their financial resources. But their examples prod us all to ask: How can we achieve that which is not impossible? What is the best use of our time?

Washington Post Writers Group