Holocaust victim

Anton Schmid was not some great general. An ordinary bloke from Vienna, conscripted into the German army and stranded in Vilnius in the summer of '41. He ran army workshops, processed forms, bossed troops around nothing to get excited about. Except that he used that dull little assignment as a front for something that the Nazis would have killed him for in an instant: rescuing Jews.

He provided them with special work permits. He concealed them in army trucks and smuggled them out of the Vilna Ghetto as if it were just a supply run. He even converted his own living room into a sanctuary for a writer and his wife, and a hideaway for resistance fighters who would not be able to take any risks.

Of course, in Nazi Germany this did not exactly end well. Schmid's run of good fortune finally came to an end by January '42. They arrested him, called it treason, and made the trial short. Firing squad. April 13, 1942. Vilnius. Done.

He assisted around 250 individuals before they laid him to rest. That isn't a pleasant conclusion; it's a lesson. You can be such a small piece of something large and still be a problem. But you will probably suffer the repercussions.

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