Beautiful Souls: The Courage and Conscience of Ordinary People in Extraordinary Times Highlight

In every society, there are rebels and iconoclasts who don’t share the moral code to which most of their fellow citizens subscribe—who delight in thumbing their noses at whatever authority figure will pay them mind. The resisters featured in these pages are not among them. Their problem was not that they airily dismissed the values and ideals of the societies they lived in or the organizations they belonged to, but that they regarded them as inviolable. For Paul Grüninger, the inviolable ideal was the tradition of welcoming strangers he thought all Swiss citizens cherished as much as he did. For Aleksander Jevtić, it was the spirit of tolerance passed along by his mother and embodied in the slogan “Brotherhood and Unity.” For Avner Wishnitzer, it was a belief that the Israeli army really was “the most moral army in the world,” and for Leyla Wydler, it was the responsibility to exercise the due diligence she thought all members of her profession were obligated to practice. They were naïve to believe these things, a cynic with a more jaded outlook might aver. But had they been more cynical or jaded, they would not have felt so committed to the principles they assumed should be guiding them, or so disillusioned when they saw them being compromised and ignored.