Ordinary Heroes [antikvár]

FOREWORD In our times young people often find it hard to choose an example to follow. They feel that there is little opportunity nowadays to show personal courage. Amid all the evil in the world, what difference can one person make? The bravery and self-sacrifice of Ghana Szenes, the sufferings of her family and other ordinary people who become heroes under extraordinary circumstances, provide inspiration that even the greatest evil can be defeated. Ghana's aspirations for a normal life as a teacher and poet were interrupted in Budapest by homegrown anti-Semitism and the Nazi menace from outside. At seventeen she took her first independent step by becoming a Zionist: "This word conveys so much," she wrote in her diary in October 1938, "but to me it means this: I have developed a stronger consciousness and pride in being Jewish. My aim is to go to Palestine and help build the country I have become a new person and it feels right. One must have a strong idea to feel enthusiastic about, one must feel that one's life is not superfluous or spent in vain, that one is needed—and Zionism gives me this purpose." Ghana Szenes was working in her kibbutz in Eretz Israel at a safe distance from the Holocaust in Europe, but her conscience and her courage would not let her rest. She volunteered on a seemingly hopeless mission to organize Jewish resistance against the Nazi machinery of death. Again, nobody urged her to go; quite the contrary, all her friends and comrades tried to dissuade her. Ghana went because she believed that one woman could make a difference. It has been a matter of special pride to me that the Institute that bears my name, the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles, has recently honored two individuals, both of whom volunteered to go to Nazi-occupied Hungary and there fulfil their destinies. One was Raoul Wallenberg, the