Character has been a regular theme in the news since the late 1990's. One of the main issues in the 2000 Presidential campaign was this idea of character. At the time, candidate Bush spoke constantly about the virtues of his own character while Republicans in general spoke about the deficiencies of Bill Clinton's character, and by extension Al Gore's. John Kerry and John McCain also had to fend off attacks about their character.

With so much self-promotion in the media today, it almost comes as a shock to read about people with real character - people who risked their lives and the lives of their families to help strangers. People who took unimaginable risks simply because of the strength of their principles. Even more shocking today is that people did such things and then refused to talk about them, refused to take credit, even feared that they had not really done enough.

Such is the tale of Ernst Leitz, patriarch of the Leica camera company during WW2. Tails of recrimination and anger about WW2 are much more common than tales of personal heroism but this article is one of the latter. And worth your time.

As I read the article, I wondered about that word: character. What really IS character? Is it one of those Platonic ideals where people who have it dont mention it while people who dont have it talk about it constantly? Has the definition of character changed? Can strict values ever be character if they are based on hate and not on help or love of others? Is true character just too hard to maintain today or is it, as always, quietly going on around us too modest to call attention to itself?

Personally I am a little tired of dwelling on WW2 because so much of those debates are about recrimination and hate and anger. (They certainly havent stopped genocide from occurring, again and again.) Occasionally however, there are stories about heroism and kindness in the face of great hostility. Stories that show us all that no matter how bad things get, there are always a few people who really do make things better.

New life through a lens

By Mark Honigsbaum

Published: February 2 2007 16:53 | Last updated: February 2 2007 16:53

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/ee05b91e-b0f6-11db-b901-0000779e2340.html

According to Smith, both Rosenberg and Rosenthal’s son, Paul, were beneficiaries of a remarkable series of transports designed to spirit German Jews to freedom out of Nazi Germany. Now these convoys and the man who masterminded them are to finally get the recognition they deserve. This week, on February 9, the Anti-Defamation League, a non-profit group devoted to battling anti-Semitism, will present Ernst II’s granddaughter, Cornelia Kuhn-Leitz, with the Courage to Care Award, in recognition of Leitz’s role in helping at least 41 Jews to flee Germany during the Nazi persecution of the 1930s. In addition, Leitz is being credited with helping a further 23 people to circumvent Nazi laws aimed at punishing Jews and Germans related to Jews by marriage.

Past recipients of the ADL’s award include Jan and Miep Gies, who sheltered Anne Frank and her family, and Oskar Schindler, the Sudeten German industrialist who is estimated to have saved more than 1,200 Polish Jews from death in the Krakow ghetto. On the evidence available, the number of people Leitz helped was far smaller, but according to Smith, who has painstakingly pieced together the story of the Leica refugees, the risks the Wetzlar entrepreneur took were just as high.

Leitz’s humanitarian efforts on behalf of Wetzlar’s Jews began within days of Hitler’s rise to power in March 1933 and continued through Kristallnacht, the night in November 1938 when Jewish businesses and synagogues were systematically looted. Leitz’s secret campaign only ended in 1939, when Hitler’s invasion of Poland resulted in the closure of Germany’s borders.