The order had come the night before, announced over the loudspeaker: in the morning, all Jewish prisoners were to report for roll call. Everyone else was to stay inside. Master Sergeant Roddie Edmonds was the senior American non-commissioned officer at Stalag IX-A, a German POW camp near Ziegenhain. He had…
By 1985, Nelson Mandela had been in prison for 22 years. He was 66 years old, his eyesight permanently damaged, his health wearing down in the damp of his cell. The apartheid government was under growing international pressure, and P.W. Botha needed a way to ease the tension without actually…
The first thing a warder said to Nelson Mandela when he arrived on Robben Island in 1964 was: “This is the island. This is where you will die.” His cell was eight feet by seven, damp concrete with a straw mat on the floor and a bucket where the toilet…
April 20, 1964. Nelson Mandela stood in a Pretoria courtroom, facing charges that could get him hanged. He’d already been in prison for nearly two years. Now the apartheid government had him where they wanted him — on trial for sabotage and conspiracy to overthrow the state, alongside seven co-accused.…
A Small Act, A Loud Statement Being #notthroughme doesn’t always mean showing up to a protest or making headlines. It can be as simple as a decision to stand on the right side of something when the opportunity presents itself. Anastasia Kucherova had one of those opportunities at the Milan…
Lepa Radić was a seventeen-year-old member of the Yugoslav resistance during the Second World War. In 1943, after being captured by German forces, she was interrogated and offered her freedom in exchange for the names of other resistance members. She refused. Born in 1925 in a rural village in what…
Not Through Me “Let your credo be this: Let the lie come into the world, let it even triumph. But not through me.” — Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Noble Truths of the Heart (1974) The world has never lacked for lies — political, cultural, and personal. They travel fast, dressed in…