During one of the very darkest moments of world history


 a common man made a decision that most of us could never even contemplate. His surname was Schmid. No soldier of renown, no man of power-- an Austrian electrician. Silent, loving wife and daughter. Then the German army asked him to serve it, and destiny brought him to Vilnius. That is where it all shifted.

Schmid, who was in such a position, witnessed what others did not want to see Jews being dragged into the streets, rounded up and murdered. The majority rejected, went in line, latched on to security and obeyed orders. Schmid was not able to. His conscience had not submitted to remain silent.

His resistance was at first slight. A fake in this. A grudging refuge there. He took a young lady in order to guard her. In his work-room, where fifteen Jewish employees were permissible, he made a list of one hundred and fifty employees and never told of its magnification. And when ninety of them were put on the death list, Schmid did not say no. Instead he placed them in a German army truck and drove them outside the city and rescued their lives.

Such was his life--month after month lived at the uttermost. He ended up rescuing close to three hundred lives that were about to die.

The Nazis later captured him. Him they hanged in 1942.When his end came he said briefly, and unornamentedly: I did nothing but the will of a man.

And this is the visitant truth, a man not great who had touched no great history behind him left behind him a wider, a richer monument than monument: the greater history of humanity.

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