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Albert Battel

Albert Battel

On that day, the rules of war were broken. For one shocking, unbelievable moment, the unthinkable happened: German soldiers aimed their rifles directly at the notorious SS. The Nazi regime was suddenly fighting itself.
In the middle of World War II, a strange and tense standoff took place on a bridge in Przemyśl, Poland.
At the center of this conflict was a 51-year-old lawyer turned army officer named Albert Battel.
He was wearing the wrong uniform for a hero. But on that day, he decided that saving lives was more important than following orders.
The Jewish quarter of Przemyśl had been closed off with barbed wire for a long time. The people inside were terrified.
Everyone knew that when the SS trucks arrived, it meant “resettlement”—a polite word the Nazis used for deportation to death camps.
In July 1942, the order came down. The SS was coming to empty the ghetto.
Albert Battel was a Wehrmacht (regular army) officer stationed in the town.
He wasn’t a young, hot-headed soldier. He was a middle-aged man who had lived a quiet life practicing law before the war.
But when he heard the SS was coming to take the Jewish workers and their families, something inside him refused to accept it.
As the SS convoy roared toward the bridge over the River San, which was the only entrance to the ghetto, they found the way blocked.
Battel had ordered his own soldiers to lower the barrier.
When the SS commander demanded to pass, Battel refused. He didn’t have permission from his superiors.
He didn’t have orders from Berlin. He simply stood his ground. The situation became incredibly dangerous. The SS threatened him, but Battel played his final card.
He ordered his machine-gunners to aim their weapons. He told the SS that if they tried to cross the bridge, his men would open fire.
It was a moment of total silence. German soldiers aiming at German police. The SS commander, realizing Battel was serious, backed down. The trucks turned around.
Blocking the bridge was only the first step. Battel knew the SS would come back eventually. He needed to act fast.
He took his own military trucks and drove straight into the Jewish ghetto. He wasn’t there to arrest people; he was there to save them.
He knocked on doors and told families to grab what they could.
Using a loophole in the rules, he claimed these people were “essential” to the war effort. He loaded up to 100 Jewish families—men, women, and children into the army trucks.
He drove them out of the ghetto and into the safety of the local military barracks.
For that day, and the days that followed, those families were safe under the protection of the Wehrmacht.
News of what happened reached the highest levels of the Nazi government. Heinrich Himmler, the head of the SS, was furious. He ordered an investigation into Battel.
Himmler wrote a note in Battel’s file, promising to have him arrested and expelled from the Nazi party the moment the war was over.
Battel was eventually removed from his command and forced into retirement early due to heart problems.
He lost his career and his reputation among his peers.
Albert Battel survived the war, he died in 1952 in West Germany. At the time of his death, he was largely forgotten.
He never wrote a book about his actions or bragged about standing up to the SS.
However, the people he saved did not forget.
Years later, survivors began to tell the story of the officer who blocked the bridge.
In 1981, Yad Vashem (The World Holocaust Remembrance Center) recognized Albert Battel as Righteous Among the Nations.
Albert Battel’s story teaches us a powerful lesson about courage.
Courage is not about being fearless. Battel was likely terrified of being shot for treason
He was operating inside a system built on total, terrifying obedience. In Nazi Germany, the principle was rigid: Befehl ist Befehl (An order is an order), and questioning authority meant execution. Yet, in that impossible vacuum, Battel found the tiny, crucial space to rebel.
His action shatters every excuse used to justify inaction during the war. It proves that the final, most powerful authority belongs not to the general, the state, or the uniform, but to the individual conscience.
In a time of darkness, one man stopped a convoy of death simply by saying, “Not today.”
Even when the entire world is screaming at you to conform, the choice between simple obedience and fundamental decency remains entirely, beautifully, and terrifyingly yours.
Battel showed that even in the worst circumstances, we always have a choice between doing what is told and doing what is right.
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Awakening the Human Spirit
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Edwin Moses

Edwin Moses

Edwin Moses walked onto a dusty Ohio State track in 1976, set down his physics notebook beside the hurdles, and told his coach he was going to rewrite the rhythm of the race by taking thirteen steps between hurdles instead of the fourteen every expert insisted was physically impossible.
He was an engineering student, not a sports prodigy. He had no scholarship. He had no elite training. He ran workouts alone because there was no hurdling coach for him. Moses studied film like a scientist. He measured stride angles. He calculated force and drag. He scribbled equations on scrap paper and taped them above his dorm room desk. He believed the event followed predictable laws of motion and he could break them if he learned the math.
The experiment worked on his very first try. Moses glided through ten hurdles with control that startled teammates. The longer stride meant fewer adjustments. Fewer adjustments meant no hesitation. By spring he won the Olympic Trials. By summer he was in Montreal wearing United States colors that had been a fantasy months earlier.
Then he ran the four hundred hurdles faster than any human in history.
He did not stop there. After Montreal he built a training schedule with the same logic he once used for lab work. He timed every run. He tracked heart rate, fatigue, and oxygen levels. He studied race film frame by frame to eliminate wasted motion. When he returned to competition, he began a streak the world still struggles to comprehend.
Nine years. One hundred and twenty two consecutive wins. No false starts. No collapses. No excuses.
Competitors tried to match his stride pattern. They failed. Coaches tried to decode his rhythm. They failed. Reporters waited for arrogance. Moses gave them none. He spoke about discipline, spacing, timing, and respect for the craft. He believed mastery came from patience and relentless analysis, not talent alone.
Even at the Los Angeles Olympics in 1984, with the weight of a nation on his shoulders, he lined up with the same quiet expression. He ran his race, held the thirteen step pattern, and crossed the finish with daylight between him and the field.
Edwin Moses did not dominate through force.
He used clarity, intelligence, and perfect rhythm to turn an event into a system only he understood.
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Violet Hensley

Violet Hensley

In 1931, a fifteen-year-old girl in the Arkansas backwoods told her father she wanted to make a fiddle.

He pointed to his tools and a pile of wood. “There’s what you need. Help yourself.”

Violet Brumley picked up a knife and started whittling.
Her father, George Washington Brumley, had made his first fiddle in 1888 when he was fourteen years old—back when homesteaders built everything themselves because buying wasn’t an option. He’d traded fiddles for wagons, shotguns, milk cows. A fiddle was worth a dollar, maybe, if you sold it for cash.

Violet watched him work, learning which woods sang and which stayed silent. She memorized the curve of the neck, the arch of the top, the precise placement of the sound post. No blueprints. No instruction manual. Just memory and feel.

It took her months to finish that first fiddle. When she drew the bow across the strings, the sound was perfect.

She was hooked.

But life had other plans.

At eighteen, Violet married Adren Hensley. The babies started coming—nine children in all, born while the family scraped by on subsistence farming. They were so poor, Violet later joked, that “if the flies had anything to eat, they’d bring their own food.”

Between 1932 and 1934, she made three more fiddles. Then fiddle number four.

Then nothing. For twenty-seven years.

Nine children don’t raise themselves. Fields don’t plow themselves. There was no time for five-gallon buckets of wood shavings and 250-hour crafting projects when you were trying to keep your family fed.

The fiddles gathered dust. The music stayed quiet.

The family moved to Oregon to pick fruit—strawberries, potatoes, prunes. Migrant work. Survival. In 1959, they heard about cheap land near Yellville, Arkansas—forty acres for $250. They moved back, bought the land, started over.

Violet was in her forties. Her children were growing up. And slowly, quietly, she picked up her knife again.

In 1961, she made fiddle number five.

The break was over. She was a fiddle maker again.

By 1962, at age forty-six, someone convinced her to enter the local Turkey Trot Talent Show in Yellville. She came in second. At the show, she met Jimmy Driftwood, a folk musician who invited her to play at his theater in Mountain View.

That led to the War Eagle Craft Fair.

Which led to Silver Dollar City discovering her in 1967.
The theme park in Branson, Missouri, originally wanted her as a woodcarver. But when they heard her play the fiddles she’d made with her own hands—heard her unique style, her Ozark rhythms, her refusal to play like anyone else—they changed their minds.

They wanted her to fiddle.

And suddenly, after fifty years of obscurity, Violet Hensley became famous.

Not movie-star famous. Folk-legend famous. The kind where Charles Kuralt shows up to interview you for CBS News. Where National Geographic features you in 1970. Where producers from Captain Kangaroo and The Beverly Hillbillies call asking if you’ll appear on their shows.

She traveled to promote Silver Dollar City, appearing on The Art Linkletter Show in 1970, walking around eating ice cream with “Granny” when The Beverly Hillbillies filmed episodes at the park. In 1977, she danced with Mr. Green Jeans on Captain Kangaroo. In 1992, she was on Live with Regis and Kathie Lee.

Through it all, she kept making fiddles. Seventy-four in total, each one taking about 260 hours of work. She used native Ozark woods—buckeye, sassafras, pine, spruce, basswood, cherry, curly maple, bird’s eye maple, quilted maple. She’d cut down the trees herself with a handsaw.

“Someone asked me a long time ago what my secret was of putting the tone into a fiddle,” she said. “The tone just comes in with the wood as best as I can figure.”

Her fiddles became treasures. Collectors paid thousands. Museums displayed them. But Violet kept a few she wouldn’t sell for any price.

She also learned to clog at age sixty-nine—doctor’s orders, after they told her to stop breaking horses and bareback riding. Her signature move became playing the fiddle on top of her head while clogging, her face beaming with pure joy.

For decades, she demonstrated at Silver Dollar City’s festivals. She released three albums with her family—daughters Sandra and Lewonna, husband Adren, son Calvin. The old-time tunes her father had taught her, songs that weren’t widely circulated, preserved through her hands and voice.

In 2004, the Arkansas Arts Council designated her an Arkansas Living Treasure.

But Violet had one dream left.

She’d grown up listening to the Grand Ole Opry on a battery-powered radio when she was nine years old, just after the show debuted in 1925. For ninety years, she’d listened to that program, playing along in her Arkansas cabin, imagining what it would be like to stand on that stage.

It seemed impossible. She was too old, too unknown, too far from Nashville’s spotlight.

Then fiddler Tim Crouch read her autobiography and found mention of her dream. He contacted Opry star Mike Snider.

And on August 6, 2016, at ninety-nine years old, Violet Hensley walked onto the Grand Ole Opry stage.

She wore a purple dress hand-sewn by her daughter Sandra. She carried fiddle number four, the one she’d made when she was seventeen years old.

The audience of 4,400 people rose to their feet before she even played a note.

Snider warned them: “This little lady plays her way.“

Violet launched into “Angelina Baker,” and the band scrambled to keep up with her rapid-fire fiddling. Her unique style—developed in isolation, learned from her father and the old-time fiddlers of the Ozarks—was unlike anything Nashville had heard.

When she finished, the applause was thunderous.

She returned in 2017 for her 100th birthday. Then again in 2018. Three times on the Opry stage, each time leaving audiences with their jaws on the floor.

In 2018, at age 101, she was inducted into the National Fiddler Hall of Fame.
And she kept going.

At 105, she contracted COVID-19. Her symptoms were mild. She recovered.

Today, at 109 years old, Violet Hensley is still alive in Yellville, Arkansas.

Her vision is too poor to make complete fiddles now, but she can still whittle by feel. She still demonstrates her craft. She still plays—fifty-eight years performing at Silver Dollar City and counting.

Her daughters say that while her muscles and words may fail her sometimes, the music never does. “For 109, she probably remembers more than we know, but just can’t say it. She feels it.”

The girl who made her first fiddle in poverty, who spent decades raising children in obscurity, who didn’t become famous until she was in her fifties, who finally achieved her lifelong dream at ninety-nine—she’s still here.

A living bridge to an Ozarks that barely exists anymore. A testament to craft, to patience, to the long game. A reminder that dreams don’t have expiration dates.

Her story started with a father telling his daughter to help herself to his tools. It continues with a 109-year-old woman whose handmade fiddles are museum pieces, whose music has inspired generations, whose life proves that fame delayed isn’t fame denied.

Violet Hensley didn’t become a legend by starting early or burning bright and fast.

She became a legend by never stopping. By making seventy-four fiddles one knife stroke at a time. By playing the music she loved for a century, whether anyone was listening or not.

And when the world finally noticed, she was ready. She’d been practicing for ninety years.

Would you have had the patience to spend decades perfecting a craft in obscurity, knowing your moment might never come?

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How a Generation of Women Was Misled About Hormone Therapy

The FDA’s removal of hormone therapy warnings after 23 years validates what many women suspected.

“Was I misled?”

That’s the question I hear most from my patients lately—asked with anger, exhaustion, and the quiet devastation of women who wonder if they lost years of their lives to menopause symptoms they were told were untreatable.

The answer came earlier this month when the U.S. Food and Drug Administration announced it would remove “black box” warnings from hormone therapy products after 23 years. For many women, the reversal is an admission that arrives decades too late.

What Happened in 2002
In July 2002, preliminary data from the Women’s Health Initiative (WHI) were published in JAMA, showing that combined hormone therapy (estrogen and progestin) increased the risk of breast cancer, stroke, and pulmonary embolism. Major media outlets interpreted early signals from the study as definitive danger, and the announcement led to an instant and dramatic decline in the use of hormone therapy.
Women who had been sleeping well for the first time in years suddenly poured their medications into the trash. Pharmacies fielded calls from panicked patients demanding immediate discontinuation. Primary care doctors, most of whom had never been trained deeply in menopause management, told their patients to “stop now and ask questions later.”

Women did stop, and many suffered in silence for the next 20 years.

The FDA’s Historic Reversal
On Nov. 10, the FDA announced that it is initiating the removal of broad “black box” warnings referencing risks of cardiovascular disease, breast cancer, and probable dementia from hormone replacement therapy products for menopause.

When FDA Commissioner Dr. Marty Makary spoke publicly about the shift, he didn’t mince words. He said the media had frightened women away from a potentially life-changing therapy, and he noted the difference between estrogen-only therapy and synthetic combination regimens. He acknowledged, openly, that the “fear machine” had begun long before the scientific data had been fully understood.

He also said something that struck many women deeply: “After 23 years of dogma, the FDA is stopping the fear that has steered women away from this life-saving treatment.”

For many of my patients, that sentence felt like a validation they had waited half a lifetime to hear.

The Devil Is in the Details
The details that matter most sat quietly in the medical literature for years—in the 2002 article and the two follow-up studies published in 2011 and 2020 in JAMA.

The Study Population Was Older
Women recruited in the WHI study were all postmenopausal, aged 50 to 79 years, with an average age of 63—more than a decade past the onset of menopause. Most had not used hormones before, and many had cardiovascular risk factors.

The Hormones Were Synthetic
The adverse results found among older women taking combined conjugated equine estrogen and medroxyprogesterone acetate—both older, synthetic formulations developed in a different era—were generalized to all hormone therapy types and all age groups.

Estrogen-Only Therapy Showed Different Results
The estrogen-only group in the WHI study—women who had hysterectomies and therefore received estrogen without synthetic progestins—had a lower rate of breast cancer.
In the storm of fear that followed, no one wanted to hear nuance.

The Critical Factor
Yet even in the early 2000s, there were physicians who paused, confused because something about the reporting didn’t align with what they were seeing clinically. The hormones used in the WHI study weren’t the bioidentical estradiol and progesterone that many clinicians were already prescribing with good results. More importantly, the women who seemed to benefit most from hormone therapy were those who began it near menopause—not in older age.

Timing is critical. The body responds to estrogen very differently pre-menopause versus a decade post-menopause. After years of low estrogen, the blood vessels lose their flexibility, plaque accumulates, and metabolic changes settle in. The risk-benefit balance is fundamentally different for women who initiate hormone therapy at different ages.

This is what we in medicine now call the “timing hypothesis”—a concept that should have been central to every headline but was lost entirely.

And for two decades, women lived inside that headline and endured the consequences of fear and misinformation.

What Women Lost
The point is not that hormone therapy is perfect or appropriate for everyone. It’s that women were never given the chance to make an informed choice.

Women who begin hormone therapy earlier—ideally within 10 years of menopause—tend to experience improved sleep, reduced anxiety and irritability, and protection against bone loss.

Many report better cognition, improved cardiovascular markers, and enhanced sexual health and relationship well-being. Although spoken about more quietly, perhaps the most profound benefit is the simplest one: the return of themselves.

Takeaways
The new FDA guidelines do not signal a new fad or a sudden reversal. They mark a return to evidence-based medicine—the kind that millions of women should have received all along.
Hormone therapy is not appropriate for every woman, and it is not a cure-all. However, it is a powerful tool, and for the right woman at the right moment, it can restore a quality of life she thought she’d lost forever.

Our job now—as clinicians, as journalists, as a society—is to give women back what fear took from them: clarity, choice, and control.

Everything that follows in this series of columns will build on that mission.

Source: https://www.theepochtimes.com/health/how-a-generation-of-women-was-misled-about-hormone-therapy-5951141

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Advisers plan biggest change yet to childhood vaccine schedule

On December 2nd the Washington Post ran a panicked story headlined, “RFK Jr.’s vaccine advisers plan biggest change yet to childhood schedule.” Kirk Milhoan, newly appointed chair of the CDC’s Vaccine Advisory Committee, ominously announced, “Not enough attention is being paid to risk.”

Dr. Milhoan, who replaced former committee chair Marty Makary, is a pediatric cardiologist, ivermectin proponent, and long-time critic of covid vaccines. You can imagine how much the media likes him. Yesterday, Dr. Milhoan announced that committee members, meeting tomorrow and Friday, will “broadly scrutinize” the entire pediatric vaccine schedule. You could hear a pin drop.

The “discussions on the timing of vaccines and ingredients could signal major changes to how children in the United States are vaccinated,” the Post reported despairingly. Tomorrow, the committee will formally vote on scrapping the hepatitis B vaccine for babies at birth, so long as their mothers test negative for the virus. (Hep B is usually acquired through sex and illegal drug use.)

Furthermore, and even more encouraging, the committee is “looking at what may be causing some of the long-term changes we’re seeing in population data in children, specifically things such as asthma and eczema and other autoimmune diseases,” Milhoan said in an interview Monday.

Then he dropped the hammer. Milhoan said, “What we’re trying to do is figure out if there are factors within vaccines” that could be causing these problems, instantly terrifying every reporter within earshot and sending ice shooting through their veins (at least, the ones not punctured by needle holes).

Currently, and specifically, the committee is considering aluminum, which is added to over a dozen scheduled vaccines, intended to shock recipients’ immune systems into working even better than without aluminum.

“Public health and medical experts have raised alarms that the panel is moving toward recommending that only vaccines without aluminum adjuvants be used,” the Post said. “ Vaccine industry officials said that removing aluminum adjuvants from vaccines would cost billions of dollars and that finding a replacement would take years,” it explained.

The bowtied brigades can feel the walls closing in. Last week, the CDC revised its website to remove the claim that vaccines don’t cause autism. On Friday, the nation’s top vaccine regulator, Dr. Vinay Prasad, announced more stringent approaches to approving vaccines, citing research showing at least ten kids had been killed by the covid shots. Now this.

Government is glacially slow, which is probably a good thing in most cases. By any sane measure, RFK’s team is moving at lightspeed. This is terrific progress.

Source: https://open.substack.com/pub/coffeeandcovid/p/coon-capers-wednesday-december-3?utm_campaign=post

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The Calmest Statement

The Calmest Statement

All four engines died at 37,000 feet—and the captain’s announcement became the calmest statement in aviation history.

June 24, 1982. Seven miles above the Indian Ocean.
British Airways Flight 9—a Boeing 747 carrying 263 souls—was cruising peacefully through the night when something impossible began.

First, the crew noticed St. Elmo’s fire. An eerie blue glow crackling across the cockpit windows like electricity dancing on glass.

Then shimmering sparks appeared along the wings, as if the aircraft were trailing fire through darkness.

Captain Eric Moody and his crew had thousands of flying hours between them. They’d seen unusual weather. They’d handled emergencies.

But they’d never seen anything like this.

Then came the alarm they dreaded most.

Engine four had failed.

Before they could process it, engine two quit.

Then engine one.

Then engine three.

In less than 90 seconds, all four engines had stopped.
Complete silence.

At seven miles above the ocean.

A commercial jet losing one engine is manageable. Losing two is a serious emergency. Losing three is catastrophic.

Losing all four?

That’s not supposed to happen. Ever.

Yet here was Captain Moody, flying a 300-ton glider with 263 people aboard, no engines, no power, and no idea why.

The 747 was descending—losing altitude at an alarming rate. Below them: the dark Indian Ocean and the mountainous Indonesian coastline.

They had minutes to figure out what happened and somehow restart the engines.

In the cabin, passengers saw strange sparks outside their windows. Oxygen masks dropped. Thick, acrid smoke filled the air, smelling like sulfur.

People began writing farewell notes.

Then Captain Moody’s voice came over the intercom with what would become one of the most famous announcements in aviation history:

“Ladies and gentlemen, this is your captain speaking. We have a small problem. All four engines have stopped. We are doing our damnedest to get them going again. I trust you are not in too much distress.”

A small problem.

All four engines stopped.

Seven miles in the sky.

That’s not just British understatement. That’s leadership—keeping 263 people calm while facing catastrophe.

In the cockpit: controlled chaos.

Senior First Officer Roger Greaves’ oxygen mask had broken, leaving him gasping in the thin air. Moody immediately descended—trading precious altitude for breathable air.

Flight Engineer Barry Townley-Freeman worked frantically through engine restart procedures while First Officer Barry Fremantle handled communications with Jakarta.

They tried restarting the engines.

Nothing.

Again. Nothing.

Ten attempts. Twelve. Fifteen.

Each failure meant less altitude. Less time. Less sky.

The aircraft descended through 15,000 feet. Then 14,000. Then 13,000.

Below them, somewhere in darkness, were Java’s mountains.
They were running out of options.

At 13,500 feet—with terrain looming—engine four suddenly coughed, sputtered, and roared back to life.

Then engine three.

Then engine one.

Finally, engine two.

All four engines—dead for 13 minutes and 13,000 feet of descent—had somehow restarted.

They had power. They had control.

But they still weren’t safe.

Whatever had killed the engines had also destroyed the windscreen. The windows were opaque, sandblasted to translucence by millions of tiny particles traveling at 500 mph.

Captain Moody could barely see through them.

They had to land this crippled aircraft essentially flying blind.

They used side windows for glimpses. Relied on instruments. Followed radio guidance from Jakarta, trusting voices from the ground.

And somehow, impossibly, Captain Moody brought the battered 747 down safely at Jakarta’s Halim Perdanakusuma Airport.

Not a single person died.

All 263 passengers and crew walked away.

Only after landing did investigators discover the truth.

Mount Galunggung in Java had been erupting. On June 24, it sent a massive ash cloud eight miles high—spreading across flight paths.

Flight 9 had flown directly through it in darkness.
Volcanic ash is pulverized rock—microscopic glass shards suspended in air. Invisible to weather radar. Nearly impossible to see at night.

When jet engines running at over 1,000 degrees ingest it, the ash melts instantly, coating components like molten glass and choking the engines completely.

The engines restarted only because Moody’s descent brought them below the ash cloud, where cooler air allowed the melted glass to solidify and break off.

It was luck as much as skill.

But the skill kept them alive long enough for the luck to matter.

British Airways Flight 9 changed aviation forever.

Before June 24, 1982, volcanic ash was considered a minor nuisance.

After Flight 9:

Global volcanic ash detection systems were established
Airlines receive real-time eruption alerts.

Flight paths are immediately rerouted around ash clouds
The International Airways Volcano Watch was created.

Captain Moody’s experience—and his crew’s quick thinking—saved not just 263 people that night.

It potentially saved thousands in the decades since.
Captain Moody continued flying until retirement. He’s remembered not just for his skill, but for that famous announcement—the calm understatement quoted in aviation training worldwide.

“We have a small problem. All four engines have stopped.”
That’s leadership. Keeping people calm when the world is falling apart. Refusing to give up when giving up would be understandable.

The lesson:

The impossible sometimes happens. Prepare anyway.

Calm leadership saves lives. Panic kills.

Never give up. Moody’s crew tried over 15 times to restart those engines. The 15th attempt worked. If they’d stopped at 14, everyone dies.

June 24, 1982.

All four engines died at 37,000 feet.

The crew had 13 minutes to solve an impossible problem.

They couldn’t see why the engines failed.

They couldn’t see the ash cloud killing them.

They couldn’t see the runway when they landed.

But they could think. They could try. They could refuse to quit.

And 263 people survived because four men in a cockpit refused to accept the impossible.

That’s not just an aviation story.

That’s a reminder that even when all four engines fail—literally and metaphorically—you keep trying. You stay calm. You don’t give up.

Because sometimes, the 15th attempt is the one that works.

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Anna Essinger

Anna Essinger

In April 1933, the Nazis ordered every public building in Germany to fly the swastika.
Anna Essinger looked at the flag. Looked at her students. And made a decision.
She organized a hiking trip.
When the children returned, the flag was gone. It had flown, as required by law—but over an empty building.
“Atop an empty building,” Anna said, “the flag can neither convey nor harm as much.”
It was a small act of defiance. But Anna Essinger was already planning something far larger.
She was going to smuggle her entire school out of Nazi Germany.
Anna was born in Ulm in 1879, the oldest of nine children in a secular Jewish family.
At twenty, she did something unusual for a German woman of her time—she moved to America alone, spent ten years educating herself at the University of Wisconsin, and discovered the Quakers. Their values of equality, compassion, and peaceful resistance shaped everything she would become.
She returned to Germany in 1919 on a Quaker relief mission, feeding hungry children in the aftermath of war. In 1926, she and her sisters founded a boarding school in a village called Herrlingen.
It was progressive, coeducational, open to children of any faith. Students called teachers by their first names. Corporal punishment was forbidden. The philosophy was simple: teach children to think, to question, to live without fear.
By 1933, Anna had built something rare—a school where freedom of thought was the foundation of everything.
Then Hitler became chancellor.
Anna had read Mein Kampf.
While her friends hoped the new government would moderate, Anna saw exactly what was coming. Within weeks of Hitler taking power, Jewish children across Germany were being humiliated in classrooms—ordered to stand while teachers pointed out their “biological differences,” forced to eat lunch in toilets because they were “dirty Jews.”
Anna watched as a famous Jewish educator, Kurt Hahn, was arrested. She watched as book burnings lit up Ulm’s cathedral square—the works of Einstein, Freud, Marx reduced to ash.
And she watched as someone inside her own school betrayed her.
Helman Speer, the husband of one of her teachers, wrote to the Nazi Minister of Culture to denounce Anna. Her “airy-fairy humanism,” he complained, was “altogether uncongenial” to National Socialism. He urged that a Nazi spy be installed at the school.
Anna didn’t wait to find out what would happen next.
That spring, while Germany’s democracy collapsed around her, Anna began traveling secretly across Europe—searching for a new home.
Switzerland. The Netherlands. Finally, England, where she found Quaker supporters willing to help her rent a rundown manor house in Kent called Bunce Court.
Then came the dangerous part.
Mass emigration was prohibited. If the Nazis discovered her plan, they could seize the school, impose crippling sanctions, or worse. Everything had to happen in secret.
Anna gathered the parents in small, hidden meetings across Germany. She explained what she intended to do. She asked for their trust—and their children.
Nearly all of them said yes.
That summer, while the children thought they were simply on vacation, Anna’s staff secretly taught them English. Lessons in British history and culture. Preparation for a journey the students didn’t yet know they would take.
On October 5, 1933, Anna Essinger executed one of the most remarkable escapes of the Nazi era.
Her most trusted teachers spread out across Germany in three teams. Parents brought their children to pre-assigned railway stations along three separate routes out of the country.
They had been warned: show no emotion on the platforms. No tears. No long goodbyes. Nothing that might attract attention.
One group traveled along the Rhine from Basel. Another moved through Munich, Stuttgart, and Mannheim. A third crossed northern Germany.
On the trains, everyone was silent as they approached the border.
Sixty-six children. Their teachers. Their headmistress.
All of them made it to England.
Classes began the next day.
Bunce Court was a wreck—an old manor house that had been abandoned for years.
There was no money for repairs, no funds for domestic help. So everyone worked. Students and teachers together, gardening, laying telephone cables, converting stables into dormitories.
British inspectors initially viewed the school with suspicion. But within a few years, they declared themselves amazed “at what could be achieved in teaching with limited facilities.” They concluded it was “the personality, enthusiasm and interest of teachers rather than their teaching apparatus” that made the school work.
And what teachers they were.
As war approached and Britain classified German refugees as “enemy aliens,” many were forbidden from professional work elsewhere—but allowed to remain at Bunce Court. Suddenly, Anna had an astronomer teaching mathematics. A music teacher who had been assistant to the famous wildlife recordist Ludwig Koch. A former senior producer from Berlin’s Deutsches Theater directing school plays.
The children learned not just academics, but music, art, gardening. They performed concerts for local villagers. They stayed with English families on weekends. They found, against all odds, something like home.
One student, Leslie Brent, later called it “a paradise.” After everything he had witnessed in Germany, Bunce Court made the violence seem “like a bad dream.”
Alumni would later describe it as “Shangri-La.” They spoke of “walking on holy ground.”
But Anna’s work was far from finished.
In November 1938, after Kristallnacht, Britain agreed to accept 10,000 Jewish children on what became known as the Kindertransports. Anna was asked to establish a reception camp.
She took in as many as she could—children from Germany, Austria, Poland, Czechoslovakia. Children whose parents she would never meet. Children who would never see their families again.
As Hitler invaded country after country, the refugees kept coming. When the British military requisitioned Bunce Court, Anna found another location and moved the entire school again.
Her eyesight was failing. By the war’s end, she was going blind.
She kept working.
The last children to arrive at Anna’s school were concentration camp survivors.
They had seen things no child should see. They no longer knew what normal life looked like.
One of them was Sidney Finkel, a fourteen-year-old Polish boy who had survived the Piotrkow ghetto, slave labor camps, Buchenwald, and Theresienstadt. He arrived in England in August 1945 with ten other Polish boys, all of them shattered.
Anna and her staff treated them with patience and love. Slowly, carefully, they taught them that the world could be safe again.
Decades later, Sidney wrote about his two years at Bunce Court.
“It turned me back into a human being.”
By the time Anna closed her school in 1948, she had taught and cared for over nine hundred children.
Nine hundred.
She started with sixty-six, smuggled across borders in secret. She ended with concentration camp survivors who had forgotten how to be children.
She stayed at Bunce Court until her death in 1960, corresponding with former students, watching them build lives she had made possible.
They became scientists, artists, professors, doctors. Frank Auerbach became one of Britain’s most celebrated painters. Leslie Brent became a pioneering immunologist. They scattered across the world, carrying with them what Anna had given them—not just survival, but the belief that learning and kindness and freedom were worth fighting for.
In 1933, while others hoped the darkness would pass, one woman saw clearly.
She didn’t wait for permission. She didn’t wait for someone else to act. She organized a hiking trip, smuggled sixty-six children across a border, and spent the next fifteen years saving every child she could reach.
Anna Essinger proved something that remains true today:
One person who refuses to look away can change nine hundred lives.
One school built on freedom can outlast any regime built on fear.
One flag flying over an empty building can be the beginning of the end—not for the children beneath it, but for everything that flag was supposed to represent.