“Ordinary Heroes” is a growing collection of over fifty stories of rescue and survival, in which ordinary people helped or saved threatened neighbors, friends, acquaintances, and even complete strangers during war and genocide.

The people whose stories are in shared in this collection come from different countries and historical periods: the Holocaust in Europe, Cambodia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, and Rwanda. We invite you to read and listen to these stories with empathy and connect with the hero within yourself.

Bosnia and Herzegovina, 1992-1995

» More than 2 million refugees and displaced persons

» 200,000 dead

» 20,000 raped women and girls.

Cambodia, 1975-1979

» During the genocide in Cambodia, approximately 1.7 million people were murdered by the Pol Pot regime (21% of the country’s population)

» 158 prisons were run by Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge regime

» 309 mass-grave sites with an estimated total of 19,000 grave pits.

The Holocaust, 1939-1945

The Nazi regime murdered:

» 6 million Jews

» at least 200,000 Roma.

Rwanda, April – July 1994

» 800,000 people, mostly ethnic Tutsis and moderate Hutus, were killed in a hundred days, primarily with machetes;

» 2 million Hutus fled the country for fear of retaliation. The majority continues to live in Burundi, Tanzania, Uganda and DRC.

» 50,000 Rwandan refugees are still living in various states of Africa.