Open any volume of modern history, and the blood of innocents pours onto your hands. From government policies of starvation to countless varieties of religious wars, the 20th century newspaper is one huge Domesday Book, a catalog of horrors so vast that numbers lose human meaning. One death is a tragedy; millions of deaths are statistics, to be deplored, then filed away as nightmares beyond comprehension. The atrocities nag at our conscience, finally numbing it. Amnesia seems the only solace.
So it is therapeutic to be reminded of the small stories of heroism, brutality and survival that restore dimension to the...