Unsung Heroes

There are instances of heroic deeds that had no immediate witness, such as the Scholls’s attempt in 1943 to raise their nation’s conscience, suppressed by Hitler’s propaganda machine. The Canadian physicist Dr. Slotin acted in 1946; but since ‘the bomb’ was supposed to be fail-safe, his feat was not released to the public. A KGB commissar gagged Captain Marinesco in 1945, just as Moscow’s rulers silently did away with Colonel Maleter in 1956 as a hindrance for their political ambition. In the case of Parteigenosse Duckwitz in 1943, nobody discovered that he was behind the betrayal of the Nazi plan, and he wouldn’t publicise his disloyalty to his Führer. It took faith and courage for a Palermo priest to go up against the Sicilian Mafia in 1993. Holding out against impossible odds was a Yankee pilot in a clapped-out aircraft in 1941, and a British battalion against an entire army in Korea 1951. And there is the sergeant who in 1916 blundered into an ‘impregnable fortress’ and then took it single-handedly.

These are a few brave man and women who dared to stand up and be counted. Some had to pay a bitter price for remaining loyal to their principles, but all of them changed the course of history.