A plane carrying a mother, father, and their two teenage daughters crashed into a tree in a Florida neighborhood and caught fire. As smoke poured from the wreckage, four neighbors rushed toward the burning aircraft armed with an axe, a hammer, and a fire extinguisher. But to save the family inside, they would have to fight their way into a burning aircraft before the flames spread. It happened in Pembroke Pines, Florida. The family was approaching a nearby airport when their plane crashed into a tree outside someone’s home. Hearing the impact, four neighbors rushed outside to find smoke rising from the wreckage and the family trapped inside. Without hesitation, they grabbed tools and began smashing through the damaged cockpit, managing to pull the father and his two teenage daughters to safety, but the mother was still trapped inside. With flames spreading quickly, some fought the fire using a garden hose and extinguisher while the others desperately worked to break through the twisted metal and reach her. Finally, they pulled her free, saving all four family members. Without these neighbors risking their own lives, this could have ended in tragedy. Instead, an entire family is alive because four ordinary people refused to stand by. Let’s give these everyday heroes the recognition they deserve.

In 1942 Viktor Frankl was sent to a Nazi concentration camp. Before his arrest he was a respected psychiatrist in Vienna with a family and a manuscript that represented years of work. At the camp his head was shaved, his clothes were taken, and he was given the number 119,104. One of the hardest moments came when the Nazis found his manuscript and burned it in front of him. He had been offered a visa to the United States, but his elderly parents could not go with him. He chose to stay. He was moved through several camps, including Auschwitz and Dachau. As a physician he watched the people around him. Physical strength alone did not decide who survived. Some who looked healthy declined quickly. Others who seemed too weak continued. When prisoners lost all hope, they sometimes deteriorated rapidly. Frankl returned again and again to a line from Nietzsche: “He who has a why to live for can bear almost any how.” Although the manuscript was gone, he began reconstructing it in his mind. He pictured himself after the war, standing in front of students and explaining what he had seen. He also thought constantly about his wife, Tilly. He had no way of knowing whether she was alive, but remembering her helped him continue. He tried to give the same sense of purpose to other prisoners. He would ask who was waiting for them outside or what work only they could finish. When the camps were liberated in 1945, Frankl weighed 85 pounds. Then he learned that his wife, parents, and brother were all dead. The family he had stayed for was gone. Within nine days he recreated the manuscript the Nazis had burned. The book became *Man’s Search for Meaning*. Early publishers rejected it. Readers gradually found it. It became one of the most influential books of the twentieth century. Frankl remarried, raised a daughter, climbed mountains, and continued working as a psychiatrist and teacher until his death in 1997. The Nazis had taken his possessions, destroyed his work, and reduced him to a number. They had not taken away his ability to search for meaning. He entered the camps with a career, a family, and a manuscript, and emerged having lost nearly all of them. What he carried forward was the belief that suffering does not have to be the final word.

In the dark hours of a freezing night in occupied France, a woman took off her clothes and squeezed through the narrow iron bars of a Gestapo prison cell. She held her dress between her teeth, dropped onto the street, and disappeared. Her name was Marie-Madeleine Fourcade. Before the war she had lived a life of fast cars, airplanes, and classical music. When the Germans occupied France she joined a small secret network that gathered intelligence for the Allies. In 1941 its leader was arrested and handed control to her. She was thirty-one, the mother of two young children, and she accepted without hesitation. Under her leadership the group grew into Alliance, the largest secret intelligence network in France. More than three thousand men and women joined. Nearly twenty percent were women. They used animal code names. The Gestapo called the organization Noah’s Ark. Marie-Madeleine chose Hedgehog for herself. The Nazis spent years looking for a male general. They never imagined the person running the network was the fashionable young woman standing in front of them. Many of her closest agents were captured, tortured, or killed. To protect her own children she sent them away. She could not even hug them goodbye. She stood behind a curtain and watched them walk down the street. She was captured twice and escaped both times. Her agents gathered intelligence on German positions along the Normandy beaches that helped the Allies plan the invasion. When the war ended, official recognition often favored men. She was left off many lists of national heroes. She never seemed interested in personal glory. For the rest of her life she helped surviving agents and the families of those who had been killed. Near the end she said, “God gave me the strength to stand in the dark so that others could walk in the light.”