Elderly man sets out to clean each of the 388 Holocaust memorial plaques in his city

Starting a decade ago, over a dozen European nations installed bronze 'stumbling blocks' on city streets. Each block holds a small plaque inscribed with the name, birth year, and other information of victims of the Nazis. In most cases, the blocks were installed in front of the individual's last known residence.

Dirt and grime have built up on the plaques of course. Salzburg, Austria resident Gerhard Geier thought the people memorialized on his city's streets deserved better. The 79-year-old Geier made it his year's goal to personally clean each plaque on Salzburg's 388 stumbling blocks. Why this year? To mark the darkness of the 80th anniversary of Germany's annexation of Austria with a note of humanity.

So Geier sets out armed with a footstool and cleaning supplies. He cleans each five-inch square plaque by hand, rinses it with saline, then polishes and seals the bronze to slow further damage. It may take him a half hour, but he says it feels as if he is "caressing the victims of the Nazis one last time."  He has noticed an increase in nationalism around the world, and feels it is important to remember what happened then to prevent its recurrence in the future.

Teen raises funds to send Holocaust survivor to Israel for his bar mitzvah, finally

When Holocaust survivor, 89-year-old Henry Oster spoke at Viewpoint High School in Calabasas, California, 17-year-old Drew Principe was fascinated.  He spoke with the elderly Jewish man after the assembly and presented him with a gift - a bracelet inscribed with a Jewish prayer he himself had bought on a trip to Israel several years earlier. Oster was overwhelmed with the gift, and admitted that he had never been to Israel.

The two kept in touch. Principe learned that Oster was detained by the Nazis just a few weeks before his bar mitzvah and spent time in Auschwitz. After the camp was liberated in 1945, he tracked down one of his few remaining relatives, an uncle in California. At 17, he was adopted by that uncle and began a new life in America. He never did get his bar mitzvah.

The man's story bothered Principe, and he decided to act. He wrote a letter explaining his dream of sending Oster to Israel and sent it to family and friends. They in turn spread the word. Over $15,000 was raised to cover Oster's travel expenses.

Principe didn't stop there. He learned that Yad Vashem, the Holocaust memorial in Israel, had listed Oster as a victim of the Holocaust, not as a survivor. He contacted them and set the record straight.

When Oster travels to Israel this summer, Yad Vashem will conduct an official ceremony to change his status to that of a survivor. Plus, he will finally celebrate his bar mitzvah, attended by his last living relative in Israel.

One doctor's ingenious fake epidemic

When the Nazis moved into Poland in 1939, Eugene Lazowski had just finished medical school. He was made an officer in the Polish army and stationed in the town of Rozwadow where he worked for the Red Cross. The fence which marked the border of the town's Jewish ghetto was right behind his house.

Dr. Lazowski had heard of recent discoveries by fellow Pole Dr. Stanislaw Matulewicz. It seems that a certain strain of the typhus bacteria, when killed and injected, will allow the patient to test positive for the deadly epidemic disease while remaining symptom-free. Dr. Lazowski tried it, and sent the patient's blood sample to a German lab for testing. 

The response was a red telegram - the patient has epidemic typhus and must be quarantined.

The patient was not ill.  

So Dr. Lazoswki came up with a plan. Whenever a patient came to him, be it a villager or a Jew from the ghetto (who he was forbidden to treat but did so anyway), he injected them with the bacteria. Blood samples left the village, red telegrams returned.

Soon the village and the ghetto seemed to be a hotbed of epidemic typhus. Nazis avoided the area - Germany had not had an outbreak of typhus in a generation, and officials worried about their soldiers' vulnerability. When a medical inspection team was sent to check on the epidemic's status, Dr. Lazowski planted ragged, dirty villagers in the hospital. The nervous doctors took one look and left quickly. The village quarantine was official.

The Nazis stayed away from Rozwadow for the duration of the war. Over 8,000 villagers and ghetto residents were spared the fate of other Polish villages, all because of one doctor's kind heart and his ingenuity.

Nicholas Winton, Or how an unmarried stockbroker rescued hundreds of foreign children

Last night, Michael and I watched Nicky's Family on DVD (thank you, Netflix.) It was the story of Nicholas Winton and the lasting effect of his pre-WWII efforts.

Back in December 1938, British-born Nicholas was packing for a ski trip to Switzerland when a friend named Martin Blake called and asked to meet him in Prague instead. Martin was involved in with the British Committee for Refugees from Czechoslovakia and needed Nicholas' help in figuring out how best to aid Czech people fleeing the German annexation of the Sudetenland. So, the ski trip was off.

Nicholas was moved by the plight of these displaced Czech people, their desperation. They expected that war would soon be upon them, and young parents were understandably anxious about the safety of their children. Using Martin's contacts and then establishing his own official network (including a spy and some fake documents and rubber stamping), Nicholas created the pipeline called the Czech Kindertransport which functioned until the Nazis shut it down at the start of war on Sept. 1, 1939. His work resulted in 669 Czech children, mostly Jewish, being transported safely by rail and boat to England and placed with British families for the duration of the war.

Many of the parents who sent their children off to the homes of foreign strangers themselves perished in the war and the Holocaust. It is therefore believed that Nicholas' program saved the lives of those 669 children.

A humble man, Nicholas never spoke of his efforts afterward. It wasn't until 1988 that his wife discovered a scrapbook he kept with photos and names of each of the children. She led the effort to contact these now-grown children and organized the first of many 'family' reunions. When he died at age 106, Nicholas' 'family' had grown to a world-wide, multi-generation family well over 5000 strong.

All because one man decided to do One Right Thing.