Adler visit; small acts of bravery

So Jack Adler gave a talk at UW today. Guy's a Holocaust survivor, came to tell us about anti-Semitism and his experience in various concentration/extermination camps. Talked about how he saved his sister, once, from getting sent to the gas chamber of Auschwitz. She later ended up at the chambers of another camp. Talked about a friend of his dad's who kept him from becoming a human subject in one of Josef "Angel of Death" Mengele's experiments--an experiment for the Luftwaffe to determine how much pressure the human body could take before it would burst. Talked about how an SS officer, for whom he became the cleaning boy, would put scraps of food into the stove for him to find when he cleaned out the ashes in the morning. Amid all the atrocities, it's amazing how such small acts of courage stand out. Not that they make up for the shit that went on during the Holocaust--that's not what I'm suggesting--but good deeds go a damn long way. Makes me want to be kind, to do right, to go out of my way to help somebody else. My good deed a few days ago--such a small thing--was to help a girl push her el Camino (El! Camino! El! El! Camino!) out of the ice and snow along the curb. Maybe it made a difference.