Winning a war, or at least standing up against the terrors of the enemies, takes an effort of the soldiers sent to fight, the government, and brave individual souls. Despite the dangers and fear, these brave individuals decided to stand in the crowd and do what they could to help the others. Some fought quietly, doing their thing in the background, while others were more vocal and visible in showing their dislikes. That’s exactly what these people did at the time when Hitler’s party decided to take over Europe and control them with fear and violence. In those darkest times, that’s when the light of humanity shone the most.

Carl Lutz

Words are power, so as they say.

Instead of weapons, that was what Carl Lutz used to help Jews and save as many as he could from the Holocaust. He was a Swiss diplomat who was appointed as chancellor at the Swiss Consulate in Philadelphia in 1926. In January 1935, he was assigned as vice-consul to the Swiss Consulate General in Jaffa, where he and his wife once saw how a mob of Arabs lynched a Jew.

Carl Lutz, 1943. (FOTO:FORTEPAN / Archiv für Zeitgeschichte ETH Zürich / Agnes HirschiCC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons)

He began cooperating with the Jewish Agency for Israel when he was appointed as Swiss vice-consul in Budapest. Lutz worked by issuing official Swiss protection documents that allowed almost 10,000 Hungarian Jewish children to emigrate.