Claribel Alegría was born in Nicaragua 1924 and lived her early life in El Salvador. In 1943 she came to the United States and graduated from George Washington University with a degree in Philosophy and Letters. Through her writings Alegría strove to condemn injustice and oppressive government brutality. She also wrote to urge...

Lucie Aubrac was a history teacher when she met Raymond, a Jewish engineer and army officer, in France in 1938. After France fell to the Nazis, the two joined the French Resistance, helping found the group Liberation-Sud. In 1943, Raymond, who was now an important leader in the Resistance, was captured by the Gestapo and scheduled for execution...

After our wedding at city hall in Purmerend (The Netherlands), on May 22nd 1941, Ab and I moved into an apartment in the old part of Amsterdam Oost. We ended up in Wijttenbachstraat, a rather wide street with tramrails in the center that ended at the train station Muiderpoort. Tram lines 3 and 11 stopped in front of our door. It was a city apartment...

Alia Muhammad Baker, the chief librarian of Al Basrah Central Library; the Basra, Iraq public library; worked hard to make her library a community gathering place and resource. She was proud of her country's history and the priceless heritage provided by the books in her library. As a child she was impressed and horrified by the story of the burning of...

John Basilone was born on November 4th, 1916. He grew up in the small town of Raritan, New Jersey. As a child, John was restless and had a sense of adventure from the beginning. After he graduated from 8th grade, John elected not to go to high school. He told people he was looking for adventure. However, after a few years, he had not yet...

When Ed Blanco left Brooklyn, New York for a tour with the 101st Airborne, he purchased a leather bound bookkeeper's journal from a local stationery store to use as a diary during the time he would spend in Vietnam. He carried that diary in his fatigue trouser pocket for the entire twelve months he spent in the jungle. Besides listing what he saw and experienced...

Dennis came to the U.S. in-exile from South Africa and taught in several U.S. colleges and universities throughout his stay. He became one of the most visible symbols of anti-apartheid. At the time the Reagan administration waged what seemed to many of Dennis' friends a "war" to deny him his status as a political refugee in order to return him to...

Aldo Capitini (1895-1968) was probably the most important advocate of nonviolence in 20th century Italy. He was born in modest circumstances in Perugia and went to a technical school although his passion was literature. His health was poor but he drove himself to study and won a scholarship to study philosophy and literature in Pisa...

This is Patrick. He has seen more atrocities than most any adult will in a lifetime. He was forced to kill his own mother and fight for Joseph Kony's rebel army. He escaped and was one of the "night commuters - children of Uganda," hoping to stay alive to see another new day. Each evening tens of thousands of children were forced to hide in the night to escape being killed or...

Ninety-three years ago, my grandfather went to war. A corporal in Pershing's infantry fighting the Great War, he managed to find time, paper and pencil to write weekly to his sweetheart who would become his wife, and in time, my grandmother. She saved his letters in an old shoebox which found its way to my mother's attic and...

Brian Delate served in the Vietnam War (1969) as a decorated non-commissioned officer and since 1980 has worked extensively in film, theatre and television as an actor. "Soldier’s Heart" represents his debut as a writer/director. As an actor, Delate has more than 24 films to his credit as well as 12 television series. He can be seen in the film/documentary of Salomaybe...

During his three and a half years as a prisoner of war in World War II, Vivian Eustace's Japanese captors ordered him on six different occasions to dig his own grave. Nevertheless, Viv went on to enjoy a long life in McCrae, Australia after surviving Changi prison camp in Singapore, and slave work on the infamous Thai-Burma railway and Japanese docks around...

The 2011 Right Livelihood Awards were announced today at a press conference in Stockholm by Ole von Uexkull, Executive Director, and Monika Griefahn, Co-Chair and Jury member of the Right Livelihood Award Foundation. The 2011 Right Livelihood Awards go to four recipients. One award is an honorary award, the other...

“I wanted peace because…I never had peace in my life. That’s why I said I wanted something, and most of the children there also wanted something, but they didn’t know what they wanted because they didn’t know what peace, tolerance, reconciliation, children’s rights were. You know, they didn’t know what that means for them. The children of Kosovo need..."

Meet Andrea Medina Rosas, feminist human rights lawyer and independent consultant. Andréa courageously works towards defending murdered and disappeared women, many who come from Ciudad Juárez, a city on the border of Mexico and the United States. Starting in the 1990s, Ciudad Juárez earned the nickname...

Antonio Pacitti (1924-2009) is one of the artists featured in the Voices Education Project compiled by the Charter for Compassion. Within an international listing, my husband’s name appears in the U.K. group of writers and artists who have contributed to our understanding of war. It feels right that the Project features both his life and his art, because the man and the...

Robi, an Israeli mother, ponders the possibility of meeting her son David's killer, and can't help wonder how honest she is with herself in her quest for reconciliation. Can a person who stole the life of a women's child ever truly be forgiven? Is the dialogue between perpetrators and victims the key to ending the bloody never ending Israeli/Palestinian conflict?...

Meet Haneen Zoabi. Haneen is a member of the Israeli Knesset—and the first woman to have been elected to the Knesset on an Arab party list. She bravely advocates for equal citizenship rights for the Palestinian citizens of Israel and also calls for an end to Israel’s occupation of Palestine. Haneen is part of the Palestinian Israeli minority in Israel...

ohn and Joseph were devoted to their wives and their children. John had two girls and Joseph had three boys. Both men loved their jobs. The brothers also shared one other trait: kindness. One year, John got some firefighters from New York and New Jersey together for a hockey tournament to help out a stranger. The money raised went to help defer hospital costs for...

One hundred and forty-six people died that Saturday, 125 of them, young women. They were on the eighth, ninth, and tenth floor of the Asch Building in New York City, in Greenwich Village. They couldn't get out the main exit. They raced towards the exit gate, and the exit door was locked. When the police found the women's bodies...

Angeles was a gifted teacher. Her wisdom, authenticity and compassion helped others find the peace, clarity, and courage to grow ­- often through the most difficult passages of their lives. A tsunami of gratitude was unleashed at her passing. Every year Angeles provided mentoring for approximately 800 people, either in person or via telephone...

I was born in Eritrea in 1992, and my parents desperately tried to provide a good life for me there. The war had taken a huge toll on Eritrea’s economy, which made it very difficult for my father to find a job. Even after he secured a position with the President as his cameraman, money was scarce, and educational opportunities were limited...

Mary Helen Crane grew up in San Antonio, Texas and was working at the General Depot there when the United States declared war in 1941. After observing flight training in Corpus Christi she became interested in learning to be a pilot. She began taking lessons and responded to a newspaper advertisement for what became...

Varian Fry, a 32 year old Harvard-educated classicist and editor from New York City, helped save thousands of endangered refugees who were caught in the Vichy French zone escape from Nazi terror during World War II. Yet this man, known as "the American Schindler," died in obscurity, without recognition, and having been reprimanded by...

Natalya Gorbanevskaya and seven other protesters demonstrated in Red Square on September 25, 1968 against the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia. The other demonstrators were Larisa Bogoraz, Konstantin Babtsky, Vadim Delaunay, Vladimir Dremluga, Pavel Litvinov, Viktor Fainberg, and Tatiana Baeva...

Staff Sergeant Salvatore Giunta will be awarded the Medal of Honor for his actions in Afghanistan’s Korengal Valley, an area called the Valley of Death. In October of 2007, during Operation Rock Avalanche, an ambush of at least a dozen Taliban fighters attacked Giunta’s company and left two of his fellow soldiers dead. Had it not been for Giunta, it would have likely been...

When I first started reading about political activist, Dr. Jeff Halper, I was surprised to note that he grew up in Hibbing, Minnesota—the same town where Bob Dylan (then Robert Zimmerman), lived during most of his childhood. I have no idea if they knew each other—Dylan was about six years older than Halper--but both went on to give voice to significant...

On the ninth of April 1940 around 5:30 a.m. the sound of airplanes flying over awakened me. I lived in Copenhagen close to the airport. I was used to hearing planes coming in from landing all the time. This sounded different. I rushed to the window, gaped at the sky. Hundreds of airplanes like a swarm of giant, gray birds were flying over the roofs on their way to...

Alice Herz-Sommer, a renowned concert pianist who was believed to have been the world's oldest Holocaust survivor, after she died in London at the age of 110. She was born into a German-speaking Jewish family in Prague at a time when it was part of the Austro-Hungarian empire, and endured the city's ghetto following the Nazi invasion of Czechoslovakia. She then...

During his tour in Vietnam, Angelo Charles Liteky, a Roman Catholic chaplain, often traveled with the forward line because he thought it was important to know what the boys out front were feeling. That way, when they broke down, he would be better able to persuade them to soldier on. On Dec. 6, 1967, Liteky was near the village of Phuoc Lac when his battalion...

I grew up in Lakeland, La., one of 12 children. We all lived on my parents' subsistence farm. We grew cotton, sugar cane, corn, hogs, chickens and had a large garden, but it didn't bring in much cash. So when I was 12, I got a part-time job on a dairy farm down the road, helping to milk cows. We milked 65 cows at 5 in the morning and again at 2 in afternoon...

Emily Hobhouse, the daughter of the Reginald Hobhouse and Caroline Trelawny, was born in Liskeard, Cornwall on 9th April, 1860. Educated at home, Emily lived with her parents until she was thirty-five. After the death of her father in 1895, Emily became more involved in social work and political reform. With her...

Almost 70 years ago Lorna Johnston's life was hell ... as a prisoner of war in Yokohoma, Japan, surviving on eating the glue off envelopes. The 96-year-old Kohimarama resident is the only survivor of a group of 76 Australian POW nurses and is returning to Japan, the country that caused her so much pain, this time for an official apology...

The price of peace is to abandon fear and replace it with faith -- faith that if we obey God's laws we will receive God's blessing. The price of peace is to abandon hate and allow love to reign supreme in our hearts -- love for all our fellow human beings over the world. The price of peace is to abandon arrogance and replace it with repentance and humility...

I grew up on the Southwest Side--this was the working-class Southwest Side--of Chicago in an area of bungalows and scrawny little parks. We thought my mother was a mutant at first. There were just three of us, and we couldn’t understand why all the other families would be so large. So we’d be on our knees with novenas to St. Gerard, the patron saint of...

He was responsible for bringing to the world a high-quality compact camera that changed the face of 35mm photography. But after dogged research by a British rabbi it has emerged that Ernest Leitz II had a secret but possibly greater claim to fame - saving Jews from Nazi persecution in prewar Germany. Days after Hitler's rise to power...

Ole von Uexkull, executive director of the Right Livelihood Award Foundation. announced last week this year's winners at a news conference in Stockholm. Swedish-German philanthropist von Uexkull founded the awards in 1980 to recognize the work he felt was being ignored by the Nobel Prizes. The Right Livelihood Awards...

August 9 approaches, and I am reminded again of the atomic bombing of Nagasaki 57 years ago, when I was a 16-year-old schoolgirl. I'm 73 now, and even now I seem to hear screams for help. That one plutonium bomb killed 74,000 people and heavily injured 75,000. It had the explosive power of 21,000 tons of TNT, and the temperature of the...

Most people knew Abe Osheroff as an activist--from the frontlines of the Spanish Civil War to the picket lines of the U.S. labor movement, from the struggles for civil rights in Mississippi to the work for human rights in Nicaragua. For most of his 92 years, Osheroff threw himself into the fray with rare energy and enthusiasm. A truly organic intellectual...

This is the story of Alan Ernest Peters, born Ernst Pfeffer, December 17, 1923, in Vienna, Austria. According to Alan, he lived a somewhat normal life, remarking that “I had few concerns beyond typical teenage problems. I was an average student intensely interested in politics with strong left-wing leanings, just like my father, though...

Born in France in 1905, Andrée Marthe Virot was running a beauty salon in the port city of Brest when the Nazis invaded in 1940. She joined the Resistance, initially distributing clandestine newspapers. Under the code name Agent Rose, she helped over 100 British and American pilots escape from Nazi-occupied territory...

As Rwandan troops poured into the eastern part of what was then Zaire in the fall of 1996, Archbishop Christophe Munzihirwa issued a final, fervent plea for help. "We hope that God will not abandon us and that from some part of the world will rise for us a small flare of hope," he said in his Oct. 28 message, broadcast to anyone...

Dr. Vittorio Sacerdoti folled the Nazis, and saved 45 Roman Jews, by inventing a mysterious illness. Dr. Sacerdoti revealed his remarkable tale on the 60th anniversary of liberation of Rome Sacerdoti worked from a small and ancient hospital based on an island in the River Tiber in Rome. When the Nazis arrived in the...

The six-wheeled patrol car flying a red-and-black swastika flag careened round a corner of the tiny Serbian village and skidded to a halt before a farmhouse. A squad of steel-helmeted German soldiers, led by an unsmiling young officer, jumped out and advanced toward four peasants standing before the house. While the soldiers...

In the final years of World War II, Italian businessman Giorgio Perlasca (1910 - 1992) risked his life by posing as a Spanish diplomat in order to save more than 5,000 Hungarian Jews from the Holocaust. Perlasca, a non-Jew, has been honored for his heroism, courage, and compassion by several nations, including Israel, Hungary, Italy, Spain, and the...

The story of Irena Sendler went largely unnoticed for many years. Then the story was uncovered by four young students at Uniontown High School, in Kansas, who were the winners of the 2000 Kansas state National History Day competition by writing a play Life in a Jar about the heroic actions of Irena Sendler. The girls - Elizabeth Cambers, Megan Stewart...

A harrowing diary written by a Russian teenage girl during the Nazi siege of Leningrad 70 years ago has drawn comparisons with that of Anne Frank after being published for the first time. Lena Mukhina began writing the diary in May 1941 aged 16, describing the horror of watching her family die, as well as the pains of growing up. The teenager told how she...

This is the story of Ly Sieng Ngo, a native a Cambodian and now a resident of Seattle, Washington. Ly Sieng was born into a priviliged Chinese-Cambodian family all of whom became victims of Pol Pot's "Killing Fields." The text that follows tells of Ly Sieng's life and is further illustrated with a video she graciously filmed with organizational consultant, Dr. Sally Fox, and...

The year 2003 marked the 50th anniversary of the first of seven cross-country walks for peace undertaken by Mildred Lisette Norman Ryder, between January 1, 1953 and July 7, 1981. At the age of 44, after a spiritual journey of 15 years in which she transformed herself completely, she embarked on her "calling" to be a...

Muriel Lowenthal was a sassy in-the-know sixteen year-old. The year was 1943, and World War II, though far from her native New York, was at the center of her teenage life. The music of the era reflected the war, get togethers were often to work with organizations aiding the war effort. Often boys who graduated from high school last year were...

Nancy Wake, "the White Mouse" and the most decorated woman of the 1939-45 war, disliked people messing around with her life story. Small wonder. It was an extraordinary story and an extraordinary life. Ms Wake, who has died in London just before her 99th birthday, was a New Zealander brought up in Australia. She became a nurse, a...

Orrin McClellan was born on March 22, 1985. He grew up on Whidbey Island, Washington and graduated from Bayview High School in 2003. At the age of 18 he joined the Army and spent 3 years in the service, including a deployment in Afghanistan. He returned at the age of 21 with serious and invisible wounds to...

Indelible memories link Americans to Pearl Harbor. It is a place of pilgrimage not only for the generation that fought in World War II, but also for their descendants, in some families into the fourth post-war generation. Pearl Harbor has also become a place of pilgrimage for people of countries drawn into the maelstrom of war, including hundreds of...

Imagine a person holding their child’s hand and walking through the park on a sunny Sunday afternoon. The sun is out, the air is warm and clean, like just after a spring rain. While there is a quiet, still calmness, a few details stand out—children laughing, giggling loudly as they are playing with others their own age. Sunshine reflects off of...

When World War II broke out, Urquhart joined the Army and, after a brief training period, was commissioned as an officer in The Dorset Regiment. The Battle of France ended before his unit could deploy to the Continent, and he and his men were part of the coastal defence forces in and around Dover during the Battle of Britain...

You were just a portrait on the wall. You looked so much like your daughter—my mother—but in my child’s mind, a much fancier version. Pearls around your neck, gold earrings, flowered dress. You tilted your head and made a soft, subtle smile with closed lips. Your eyes, under perfectly arched brows, seemed to hold so...

The place is Amsterdam, Holland. In a Europe that is torn apart by a Nazi regime, Sonja is forced to come to grips with unbelievable losses. Her husband, her mother and father, her younger sister, her way of life, all by the age of twenty two. Sonja's story has been written in the book, Never Surrender! a true story, by her...

The nightly mantra went something like this: “When they do come and I get vaporized, I hope I don’t feel it. If there is no hope and nothing left, then please God, take me and everyone else straight to Heaven.”The end was only and always, one millisecond away. I was deathly afraid of Russians, the word “Communist” brought shivers...

The Center School is an arts and college preparatory public school in Seattle, Washington. It is located in the Center House, a multi-purpose building on the grounds of the Seattle Center. Because of its unique placement, the Center School is affiliated with several local arts organizations, including the Seattle Repertory Theatre...

In August of 2006, I was a speaker at a veterans’ conference in Seattle. I told the story of my first arrest, in October of 1969, to those present, an audience of some 50 or 60 veterans, many of them from the Vietnam War. I looked back and remembered myself as a nineteen year old kid, full of self-righteous energy and...

Truganini was a famous Tasmanian Aboriginal. She lived between 1812-1876. In her lifetime, she saw her people decimated by murder and disease but refused to be a passive victim. Her strength and determination persist today within the Palawah people who have lived in the region for over thirty thousand years. In 1803, the first white settlers arrived in...

Tullia Zevi, a pillar of Italy's Jewish community and an ardent anti-fascist who spent the war years in exile in Switzerland, France and the US, died January 22, 2011. She was 91. Zevi, the only female president of the Union of Italian Jewish Communities, died in Rome, current union president Renzo Gattegna said. One of four children...

In early July of 2007, I was in San Diego for the wedding of my daughter Amber to a Navy helicopter pilot named Dave Cornell, a guy with a cheerful countenance and a wry sense of humor, highly competent, responsible, and smart as a whip. Just the kind of fellow you'd want to have driving a multimillion-dollar rotor-equipped bird off the deck of...