Wise Up
Good Deeds
By David Bruce
July 7, 2008
• As World War II was winding down, the Nazis knew that they had lost the war, and the prisoners in concentration camps hoped to stay alive long enough to be freed. At Mauthausen, prisoners knew that their day of liberation was coming soon.Many of the Nazi guards disappeared, and the American troops drew near. Some prisoners at Mauthausen prepared a gift for the American troops. They scoured the camp for red, white and blue cloth, and created a homemade American flag. The flag was made with love, but it did contain an error. Instead of 48 stars (the United States had 48 states at the time), the flag had 56 stars because the prisoners, making the flag from memory, guessed incorrectly how many stars the American flag displayed. No problem. On May 6, 1945, Col. Richard R. Seibel arrived at Mauthausen, and the prisoners presented him with the flag. Colonel Seibel remembered, “I thanked them and thanked them.” He also ordered that the homemade flag be flown over Mauthausen. Today, the flag is at the Simon Weisenthal Center in Los Angeles. The flag is a present from the late Col. Seibel’s son, Peter. Famed Nazi hunter Simon Weisenthal was a prisoner at Mauthausen.
• In Oak Park, Calif., on Dec. 22, 1994, a fire broke out at a residence. The Sacramento Fire Department received an alarm at about 1:30 a.m. and hurried to the scene. When the fire fighters arrived at the burning house, they immediately heard, “There’s a baby inside! You’ve got to help!” The baby was named Daishna, and she was only 23 months old.
Capt. Tim Adams went to the window of the room where the baby was supposed to be, and he looked inside. Immediately, he thought, “There’s no way there’s anybody alive in there!” He was wrong — he heard the baby scream. Capt. Adams crawled inside the room without his SCBA (self-contained breathing apparatus) because he had no time to get it. He got on the floor and crawled forward through the smoke toward the screams. Finally, he grabbed Daishna and headed back to the window and jumped out before the room was totally engulfed in flames. Daishna received treatment at the UC Davis Medical Center, and after two days she was released.
For saving Daishna’s life, Capt. Adams received the Gold Medal of Valor. His father, Ernest Adams, had won the same medal in 1963 for saving the lives of three children inside a burning apartment building.
• When she was a teenager, speed-skater Bonnie Blair had a problem. She wanted to go to the Olympics, but the skating rink in her hometown — Champaign, Ill. — was too small for her to properly train on. The nearest big rink was in Milwaukee — too far away for her father to be able to afford to send her there to train. Fortunately, she had heard about a program called Cops for Kids, and she spoke to the head police officers to see if she would qualify for their help. One officer remembers, “We had no idea what speed-skating was, but we told her, ‘You skate. We’ll raise the money.’” They did exactly that, selling candy, washing cars, and holding bake sales — and raising $7,500 for her to start training in Milwaukee. Ms. Blair did make it to the 1984 Olympics, and she finished eighth in the 500-meter speed-skating event. She kept training, and kept competing, and in future Olympics she earned five gold medals in speed-skating. (By the way, when she first started skating as a toddler, her family could find no skates in her size, so she wore her regular shoes inside the skates.)
• The last person to have a naturally occurring case of smallpox was Ali Maow Maalim, in 1977. He was a health worker in Marka, Somalia, his hometown, but he did not want to get a smallpox vaccination. He says, “I did not want to have an injection, so I rolled up my shirt, held a cotton ball over my upper arm, and strolled past the immunization team as though I’d already had the shot.” Soon afterward, he got smallpox. Mr. Maalim has continued to work in the health field, and he immunizes children against polio. He is able to use his personal experience with smallpox to do the good deed of convincing children to be immunized against polio. He says, “Because I had the sad experience of defying the vaccine and suffering as a result, I now work as a polio vaccine agent with W.H.O.” W.H.O. is the World Health Organization. He also says, “Somalia was the last country to have smallpox. I don’t want it to be the last with polio.”
• Paul Krassner, famed counterculture journalist/humorist, remembers comedian George Carlin as a very kind man. Occasionally, Mr. Krassner would perform in Los Angeles, and Mr. Carlin would send a limo to pick him up and would let him stay in his home. When Mr. Krassner opened for Mr. Carlin at the Warner-Grand Theater in San Pedro, Calif., Mr. Krassner was able to see Mr. Carlin interact with fans: “I watched as he continued to be genuinely gracious with every fan who stopped by. If they wanted his autograph, he would gladly sign his name. If they wanted to be photographed with him, he would assume the pose. If they wanted to have a little chat, he indulged them with congeniality.” Mr. Krassner said to Mr. Carlin, “You really show respect for everybody.” And Mr. Carlin replied, “Well, that’s just the way I would want to be treated.”
• During the 1930s, anti-Semitism in Germany grew enormously, and German scientists who were Jewish lost their jobs. Ernest Rutherford, who was born in New Zealand and won the 1908 Noble Prize for Chemistry, helped his German Jewish colleagues. He became the head of the Academic Assistance Council, where he helped find jobs for refugees from Germany. He helped 507 refugees find permanent jobs, and 308 find temporary jobs.
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