Save One, Save Many
“Whoever saves a single life is considered by Scripture to have saved the whole world”.
The Talmud
Very few of us have had the privilege of saving one life.
Fewer still of saving many lives.
Those who do can sometimes teach us many lessons.
This week I saw two films that are based on real life stories of people who had saved lives and the circumstances that led to these events.
“One Life” stars Anthony Hopkins as Sir Nicholas Winton, a young stockbroker who visited Czechoslovakia in 1939 and wound up saving 669 Jewish children and resettling them in the United Kingdom before the Second World War began.
The second is “La Ley del Mar” (The Law of the Sea) starring Spanish actors Luis Tosar and Lamine Thior. The movie centers around a true-life event in 2006 when the Spanish fishing vessel “Francisco y Catalina” rescued 51 African refugees stranded 100 miles from coast of Malta with no food nor water. They had been abandoned by the human traffickers to whom they had each paid $2000 each to get them safely to Europe.
Both productions deal with issues that transcend time and space; issues that affect us all today.
“One Life” depicts the antisemitism of Nazi Germany, German determination to bring all of Europe under its collective boot, and how one man who created a small network of contacts in Czechoslovakia and the United Kingdom made a huge difference in the lives of 669 children – whose descendants today number well over 6000.
Today we face the triple threat of rapidly increasing antisemitism worldwide and the nurturing of this ages-old hatred by many world leaders.
We face an expansionist Russia that seeks to take over Europe under the thumb of a paranoid dictator who cares little about how many people he must murder – including his own Russian soldiers – to achieve his goal. The West appears incapable of providing Ukraine with the weaponry required to stop the Russians before Putin embarks on a European tour – much like the Allies failed to stop Hitler in 1938 when he invaded Czechoslovakia.
We face an expansionist Islamism that uses brutal terrorism to try to bring the world under sharia law and governance and to rid the world of all nonbelievers. Islamists are destabilizing much of Africa and engaging in terrorist attacks in Europe. And yet, Westerners are reluctant to stop them and indeed, the hundreds of thousands who have demonstrated around the world since October 7th and continue to terrorize Jews everywhere.
“La Ley del Mar” brings into sharp relief the tragic fate of people forced to migrate due to war, political repression, or social oppression that results in torture and death in their homelands because of sexual orientation, gender, race, creed, or culture.
These people of all ages pay exorbitant amounts to reach freedom and an opportunity to live in peace, only to find themselves stuck at sea and drowned or stuck in the bureaucratic treadmill of reluctant governments and societies once they step on shore. In most cases they are hated by many in receiving states and by the bureaucracies that treat them shamefully.
The International Organization for Migration (IOM) has been tracking known refugee deaths since 2014. During the past decade, 63,000 refugees have died en route to their destinations.
The IOM’s recent report says that these deaths are likely to be a fraction of the number of lives lost worldwide because of the difficulty in obtaining and verifying information. Entire boats are thought to have simply disappeared on the Atlantic route from West Africa to Spain. Thousands more are believed to have died on the trek from the Sahel through the Sahara Desert to the Mediterranean.
Receiving governments are caught in a conundrum. On the one hand are the lives lost in transit and the need to resettle those who are fleeing.
On the other hand, is the responsibility of governments to husband resources and ensure the well-being of their own citizens.
Taxpayers may question the wisdom of spending their tax money of foreigners.
The unemployed may take umbrage at foreigners coming to take their jobs.
All of these are valid points that governments must factor into their governance strategies. But the causes for massive refugee movements are not going away anytime soon and proactive support will have to replace reactive policing.
True leadership is guiding one’s citizens to a better place, one in which humanitarian law and practice replaces the law of the jungle.
Most of us will never be in a position to save a human life.
But together, we can work to ensure a humanitarian approach to forced migration by electing leaders determined to generate and implement good practices and avoid the easy solutions of populism and division.
Together we can all make a difference, and together we can all save lives and ensure a better future for all, not just a select few.
This may sound naïve.
But these two films depict how “naïve” people made a difference.