The Courage to Say No

Ordinary People: The courage to say no.

The photo was taken in Hamburg in 1936, during the celebrations for the launch of a ship. In the crowed, one person refuses to raise his arm to give the Nazi salute. The man was August Landmesser. He had already been in trouble with the authorities, having been sentenced to two years hard labour for marrying a Jewish woman.
We know little else about August Landmesser, except that he had two children. By pure chance, one of his children recognized her father in this photo when it was published in a German newspaper in 1991. How proud she must have been in that moment.

Taken from:

Senrinomichi

Following the triple disaster that struck northeast Japan on 11 March, countless people in Japan and elsewhere wondered what they could do to help. It was in this spirit and at this moment that we created the Senrinomichi blog, with an immediate objective to share information about charitable initiatives in support of the direct victims of the earthquake and tsunami. On June 11, Haruki Murakami made a truly magnificent speech upon receipt of the Catalunya International Prize. This speech crystallised what we thought about 11 March; past, present and future In the weeks that followed, our energies turned to ensuring that Murakami’s speech could be read by as many people as possible, in as true a form as possible, as quickly as possible. To do this, we created the multilingual collaborative translation initiative Planting Seeds Together. The speech has been translated in ten languages, which to date have been read by 20,000 visitors. Through this, Senrinomichi has built great links with many new friends in and outside France. Through these links, we have come to understand that as well as the “visible” victims of the earthquake and tsunami, there is a whole population whose lives have been changed to a greater or lesser extent by the nuclear accident at Fukushima. We believe that it is important to provide a voice for these victims of an invisible threat, and most particularly so for the people of the Fukushima region, who are most directly affected and whose voices are being silenced for reasons which are easy to understand and which must be combatted. Senrinomichi has evolved and will continue to evolve. We have many ideas for other actions, and all that is lacking is time! Our Facebook page is complementary to the blogwww.senrinomichi.com. We hope you will visit both, as well as the Twitter page we just opened.