Left her convent to live among the dying of Calcutta, doubting God for fifty years
A schoolteacher nun who walked out into the slums of Calcutta in 1948 with a few rupees and founded the Missionaries of Charity. Revered and…
Got 669 children out of Prague in 1939 and told no one for fifty years
A London stockbroker who cancelled a skiing holiday to visit refugee camps near Prague, and spent the months before the war finding British homes for…
Took blood transfusion to the front lines of Spain and died operating for the Chinese Eighth Route Army
A Canadian surgeon who survived tuberculosis, built a mobile blood service in the Spanish Civil War and went to China in 1938 to train medics and…
Managed London slum housing tenant by tenant and co-founded the National Trust
Working from the age of fourteen after her father's bankruptcy, she showed that slum housing could be run decently, trained women to do it, fought…
A Nazi profiteer who spent his fortune bribing officials to keep 1,200 Jews alive
A womanising, hard-drinking businessman and Nazi party member who came to occupied Kraków to get rich, and ended the war bankrupt, having used his…
Built hospitals in rural Haiti and Rwanda on the principle that the poor deserve first-class medicine
Raised partly in a bus and a boat in Florida, he went to Haiti as a student, co-founded Partners In Health and spent his life proving that…
A bricklayer's son who found families living on a rubbish dump in Madagascar and built them a town
An Argentine priest of Slovenian refugee parents who in 1989 began organising the scavengers of the Antananarivo dump to quarry stone and build brick…
Led volunteer rescuers pulling families from bombed buildings in Syria's civil war
A former shopkeeper who became head of the White Helmets, the volunteer civil defence force that dug survivors out of bombed buildings in…
Handed out Swedish passes on the death marches from Budapest, then vanished into Soviet custody
A businessman with no diplomatic experience sent to Budapest in July 1944, he issued protective passports, filled thirty safe houses and bluffed the…
Stranded in Karachi on her way somewhere else, she stayed 57 years and beat leprosy in Pakistan
A German doctor and nun held up in Karachi by a visa problem in 1960, she visited a leprosy colony and never left. Her clinics and trained workers…
The first woman to run the UN refugee agency, through some of its worst years
A political scientist who spent ten years as UN High Commissioner for Refugees, pushing the agency into the middle of the Gulf War, Bosnia and Rwanda…
Walked a thousand miles fleeing war as a boy, then walked back to dig wells
One of the "Lost Boys" who fled Sudan's civil war on foot as a child, he was resettled in the United States and returned years later to drill clean…
A Chicago surgeon who kept flying into besieged Aleppo to operate under bombardment
An American orthopaedic surgeon of Syrian descent who repeatedly volunteered in besieged hospitals in Aleppo, operating through airstrikes and…
Walked eleven days to school from a Himalayan village and made cataract surgery cost a few dollars
A Nepali eye surgeon from a remote trading village who lost a sister to tuberculosis, trained with Fred Hollows, developed a sutureless cataract…
Gave birth in a cowshed, begged on railway platforms and became mother to more than a thousand orphans
An unwanted girl from Maharashtra, married at twelve and thrown out pregnant at twenty, she survived by singing for food at stations and began taking…
At 62, a convent teacher of rich girls moved into the rubbish-pickers' slums of Cairo for 22 years
Madeleine Cinquin spent decades teaching in comfortable convent schools before choosing, near retirement, to live among the zabbaleen of Cairo with…
Drove secret agents to their planes at 19, then spent her life on Europe's forgotten survivors
A wartime volunteer with the Special Operations Executive, she stayed on in ruined Europe to help displaced people nobody else wanted, and turned her…
Wrote her dreams on paper, buried them in a tin, and dug them up decades later
Married at eleven and denied schooling as a girl in rural Zimbabwe, she eventually earned a doctorate in the United States and used a television…
A Japanese doctor who decided Afghanistan needed water more than medicine and dug a canal
He went to Pakistan in 1984 to treat leprosy and opened clinics in Afghanistan. When drought struck in 2000 he put down his stethoscope, learned…
Set out for China, got as far as the East End, and never turned a destitute child away
A would-be medical missionary who found children sleeping on London rooftops and opened a home for them in 1870. By his death his homes had taken in…
An old sea captain who spent 17 years begging London's great to save its abandoned babies
A blunt, unfashionable shipwright who was appalled by infants left to die in the streets. His petition for a Foundling Hospital took nearly two…
The only surgeon for hundreds of thousands in Sudan's Nuba Mountains, and he stayed through the bombing
A former college footballer from upstate New York who went to Mother of Mercy Hospital in Gidel in 2008 and remained when war returned in 2011,…
A "Lost Boy" of Sudan who turned his own survival story into schools back home
Separated from his family as a young child fleeing civil war in Sudan, he survived years in refugee camps, was resettled in the US, and used the…
Planted 50 million trees and became the first African woman to win the Nobel Peace Prize
She saw that rural women’s hardship and Kenya’s vanishing forests were the same problem, and answered both with a simple act repeated millions of…
