No one can imagine the pressure over his shoulders since almost 4 years

Leftist Viewpoints & The Resistance

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Molly Miggins

 Jan 28

No one can imagine the pressure over his shoulders since almost 4 years.

He visits the frontlines regularly, meeting soldiers, he has never missed a single day addressing his people, delivering daily messages no matter the circumstances.

He carries the weight of looking into the eyes of grieving children who lost their fathers and comforting widows.

Who could have done better than him?

He carries out his duty the best he can, that’s the world that is not doing its best to help as it should.

As he declared early in the war when offered evacuation: “I need ammunition, not a ride.”

He is a true hero.

One person with a bottle of acid saved 14,000 lives.

Humanity

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Radh D.

 

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One person with a bottle of acid saved 14,000 lives.

He was 18 years old. His weapon was a bottle of acid. And he saved 14,000 lives.

Paris, 1943. Adolfo Kaminsky was an apprentice dyer working in a textile shop when the Nazis occupied France. He learned chemistry through fabric, understanding how certain acids interact with certain inks, which solvents dissolve which pigments, how to manipulate color at the molecular level.

He had no idea this knowledge would become the difference between life and death for thousands.

When the Gestapo began systematically identifying, documenting, and deporting French Jews to concentration camps, their primary tool was bureaucracy. Identity papers. Ration cards. Travel permits. Every document stamped, sealed, certified. And on Jewish identification papers, one word appeared in bold ink: "JUIF."

That single word was a death sentence.

The French Resistance found Kaminsky and brought him a challenge: could he remove that stamp without destroying the document? Most forgers couldn't do it. The inks were designed to be permanent. Any attempt to erase them would damage the paper, making the forgery obvious.

Kaminsky stared at the document under lamplight. Then he remembered something from the dye shop. Lactic acid. It could dissolve the specific blue ink the French government used without destroying the paper fibers beneath.

It worked.

But erasing the word was only the beginning. He had to forge replacement information. New names. New birthdates. New identities. Each document had to be perfect because a single mistake, one inconsistency, one slightly wrong shade of ink, meant torture and death not just for the person carrying the paper, but for everyone who helped them.

The Resistance set him up in a hidden attic laboratory on the Left Bank. The orders came constantly. Fifty birth certificates for children being smuggled to Switzerland. Two hundred ration cards for families hiding in attics and cellars. Three hundred transit passes for an escape route through Spain.

Kaminsky worked under a single weak lightbulb. Chemical fumes from bleach and acids burned his throat and stung his eyes until tears ran down his face. His fingers became permanently stained with ink. The tiny room grew thick with the smell of solvents.

And then he did the math.

He calculated that each document took approximately two minutes to forge properly. That meant in one hour, he could create thirty documents. Thirty chances at survival. He developed a brutal equation that haunted him: every hour he slept, thirty people could die. Every minute he rested was a minute someone remained trapped, vulnerable, waiting.

"If I sleep for an hour, 30 people will die," he told his fellow Resistance workers.

So he stopped sleeping.

During one horrific week, word came that an orphanage sheltering 300 Jewish children was about to be raided. The children needed papers immediately or they would be loaded onto trains to Auschwitz. Kaminsky locked himself in the attic and worked for two days and two nights without stopping. He forged birth certificates until his vision blurred and doubled. He forged until his hand cramped into a rigid claw and he had to massage it back to function. He forged until exhaustion finally overpowered him and he collapsed face-down onto the worktable.

He woke an hour later in a panic, furious at himself. Thirty people. He had potentially killed thirty people by sleeping.

He didn't eat. He went directly back to work.

The children escaped.

Month after month, year after year, Kaminsky worked in that dim attic. The Nazis grew more sophisticated in their document security. He grew more sophisticated in his forgery techniques. It became a silent war fought with chemistry and precision, where victory was measured in lives that continued, in children who grew up, in families that survived.

By the time Allied forces liberated Paris in August 1944, Adolfo Kaminsky had created forged papers that saved an estimated 14,000 men, women, and children from the gas chambers.

He never accepted a single cent for his work. When people offered payment, he refused. The idea of charging money to save a life was, to him, morally incomprehensible.

After the war, Kaminsky became a photographer. He lived quietly, modestly, invisibly. He never spoke about what he had done. Not to neighbors. Not to colleagues. For decades, not even to his own children. The hero who had saved thousands simply melted back into ordinary life.

Only near the end of his life did he finally share his story, and when he did, the world learned something it should never forget: that courage doesn't always carry a gun, that heroism doesn't always wear a uniform, and that one person armed with knowledge, conviction, and stubborn refusal to sleep can stand against an empire of evil and win.

Adolfo Kaminsky died in 2023 at age 97. But the 14,000 lives he saved have become families, communities, generations. His legacy isn't measured in monuments or medals.

It's measured in people who exist because a teenager with a bottle of acid decided sleep was less important than their lives.

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A champion who raced not for glory, but for humanity

Humanity

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Mandi Shre

 

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A champion who raced not for glory, but for humanity—his bicycle carried hope, not medals.

He was Italy’s most famous athlete, yet the Nazis never suspected his bicycle was saving hundreds of lives.

In 1943, German forces occupied Italy following the government's collapse. Jewish families who had lived there for generations were suddenly hunted, rounded up, and shipped to concentration camps in sealed cattle cars. The countryside became a maze of military checkpoints, and roads bristled with armed soldiers. No one moved without papers; no one traveled without being searched.

No one except Gino Bartali.

At 29, Bartali was more than a cyclist—he was a national icon. He had won the Tour de France in 1938, dominating the world’s most grueling race, and had conquered the Giro d’Italia multiple times. His face was on newspapers across the country, and children wore his jersey. When he rode through town, crowds gathered to cheer. The soldiers at the checkpoints knew his face as well as they knew their own commanders.

Gino Bartali realized he possessed something more valuable than any medal: invisibility hiding in plain sight.

One day, a message arrived from Cardinal Elia Dalla Costa of Florence. The Cardinal was secretly coordinating a network to save Jewish families hiding in convents, monasteries, and private homes across Tuscany. They had forged identity papers that could mean the difference between life and death, but they couldn't transport them. Every courier they sent was stopped and searched.

"We need someone the soldiers won't search," the Cardinal said. Bartali understood immediately. "I will go."

His plan was audacious in its simplicity. He told everyone he was training for his next big race. Wearing his racing jersey with his name emblazoned across the chest, he rode between Florence and Assisi, sometimes covering 250 miles in a single day—distances that seemed perfectly normal for a professional cyclist.

But before each ride, in the privacy of his home, he performed a different ritual. He would carefully unscrew the seat post and handlebars of his bicycle. Inside the hollow steel tubes of the frame, he would roll up photographs and forged documents: baptismal certificates, identity cards, and ration books. Everything a Jewish family needed to become, on paper, Catholic Italians. Then he would reassemble his bike and ride toward the checkpoints.

When soldiers stopped him, he had his script ready. "Gino Bartali! The champion! Can we get a photograph?"

He would smile, chat, and sign autographs. But if they moved toward his bicycle, he became urgent and protective. "Please, don't touch the bike! Every component is perfectly calibrated. If you adjust anything, it ruins the balance, and I have to race in weeks!"

The starstruck soldiers, not wanting to damage the equipment of a hero, would step back and wave him through. They never suspected that hidden within the hollow steel tubes were documents that would save entire families.

Bartali rode past machine guns, tanks, and military convoys. He rode through rain and summer heat, fueled by a fear far greater than the exhaustion of training. If the Nazis discovered even one forged paper, he and his family would likely have been executed.

He didn't stop at being a courier. In a concealed basement in his own home, Bartali hid the Goldenberg family, Jewish refugees with nowhere else to go. Every day he brought them food, and every night he prayed they wouldn't be discovered. Every morning, he chose to risk everything all over again.

By the time the war ended in 1945, Bartali's secret network had saved approximately 800 Jewish lives. These were parents, children, and grandparents who survived because a cyclist used his fame as a weapon against tyranny.

When liberation came, Bartali simply went back to racing. In 1948, at age 34, he stunned the world by winning the Tour de France again—ten years after his first victory. When the press asked how he had spent the war years, he simply smiled and said nothing.

For the next 52 years, Gino Bartali never spoke publicly about what he had done. When his son asked about the rumors of his wartime heroism, Bartali replied: "Good is something you do, not something you talk about. Some medals are pinned to your soul, not to your jacket."

He died in May 2000 at age 85, still silent about his actions. It was only after his death that his family discovered the diaries and letters, and the survivors began to come forward. In 2013, Yad Vashem recognized Gino Bartali as Righteous Among the Nations, an honor given to non-Jews who risked their lives to save Jews during the Holocaust.

The champion who once stood on podiums was finally acknowledged for the victories that truly mattered. Gino Bartali proved that heroism isn't always loud; sometimes it’s a man on a bicycle, racing not for glory, but for humanity.

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Which are the best websites for teens and college students to earn money online?

Darius Grigorjevas

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Head of Customer Success at Hostinger.com Updated 5y

Which are the best websites for teens and college students to earn money online?

What if I told you that rather than using various websites online, you could create a profitable website yourself? Not only that, but it doesn't take long to build one whatsoever! From doing miscellaneous work online, filling out surveys, freelancing, and so on, it is a fact that the ways to earn money are close to unlimited. But did you know, starting a website can open up the gates to much more than only one way to make a profit?

Please stick with me for a bit longer, since there's a secret I'd like to share. Creating a website is not as tricky as it's portrayed to be! There are only three things that you will need, them being:

1. A hosting provider to have your website online and available to others!
2. A building platform to create a website or coding skills to build it yourself!
3. A domain name so people can differentiate your website from others!

You might be wondering what those things that I've mentioned are. Should I talk more about a hosting provider? A building platform? A domain name? I hope you are saying yes because here I go (feel free to skip this part if you already know about it!):

A hosting provider allows you to publish your site online as it provides services of storing your website's data in their servers. Fairly enough, there are already multiple hosting providers that you could choose from, and all of them sound great! Not only that, but the variety of plans causes even more confusion! So, what exactly is it that you should be looking for in a hosting provider and a plan?

• For a freshly squeezed website, shared hosting plan is an option that is hard to resist. It covers the needs of your brand new website and the beginning of incoming traffic.
• A hosting provider offering 24/7 Support! From time to time, we can't figure something out, and we wish somebody was there for us, telling exactly what we should do, whether it's day or night.
• 99.9% Uptime! Did I ever hear someone wish for their website to be down? Can't remember... Can you think of someone?
• Cost-efficiency. We always want to receive what we pay for and are even happier if we receive more. Speaking of which, have you heard about Hostinger?

Don't know how to code? No problem, building platforms got your back. Want to create a gorgeous yet simple website? Free templates and themes are easily reachable to everyone! To put it simply, a building platform is a tool allowing you to build your website. By the way, not all of them have to be pricey, there are free options as well, offering both easy building and free yet beautiful templates such as Zyro.

Let’s not forget content management systems (CMS). While there are quite a lot of them, including Drupal, Joomla, Magento, and so on, one of the most popular ones is WordPress, as 35% of the internet is powered by it. If you do decide to use WordPress, then do check if your hosting provider is optimized for it, to improve the performance even more. If you desire to learn to code and build the website yourself, feel free to check out this tutorial.

A domain name is going to be the address of your website, so make sure it's not too difficult to read and memorize as it is often used for branding as well! More often than not, along with buying a certain hosting package, a domain such as .com can be included for free as well. Keep an eye on it!

Finally, we are finished with the theory! As I've mentioned, there's more than one way to earn money online, let's talk about them.

Affiliate marketing. What will you do? Quite simple! Promote the products of the company you chose! A website is a huge plus for affiliate marketing, as you can have your own source that you control. Putting affiliate links on your website or having them in your navigation menu brings more exposure to potential customers. It's a great and easy way to start earning money, as entering affiliate marketing is quick and easy. Not only that, but you can earn up to 60% of the commission, or perhaps even more, depending on the company that you choose. Make sure, though, to follow the rules of the company that you are promoting.

Blogging. Do you think somewhere deep within you, there's a writer just thriving to bloom? Writing and building a blog can be efficient not only for affiliate marketing but for building your network and advertising. Of course, you can also buy content for a blog, but that comes with extra costs, doesn't it? Adding affiliate links to your content, or even writing about the product you are an affiliate of can bring more customers. To add more, guest blogging (sharing your content on someone else's website) is an important part of blogging, and a great way to widen your network too!

Ads. As I've mentioned, blogging will bring you lots of opportunities, ads being one of them. Google AdSense is a simple yet very efficient and often-used tool to put advertisements on a website. Make sure you don't put too many of them, so it doesn't distract a user that much.

Starting an e-store. A great way to earn money is creating a store. Whether it's dropshipping, selling merchandise, or whatever you come up with! If you use WordPress to build a store, you will most likely hear about WooCommerce. It's built for WordPress, and it offers features such as managing orders, coupons, and so much more.

Freelancing. At some point in our life, we all had thoughts about how amazing it would be to wake up, grab your laptop, and work from bed. Apparently, now it’s one of the most popular ways to generate income. Crazy, right?! People with professions like graphic designers, web designers, and many others tend to have a place where they share their work. This way, a client can decide whether their work style is something they would like to see. Having a website is a great way to build such a portfolio and present your skills in a unique way.

Here are some of the most popular ways of earning money online with a website. I hope you had as much fun reading as I did while writing, and I do hope it was helpful. Now, what are you waiting for? You know you can do it!

One lesson. Two weeks. A hundred lives. Education saves lives.

Humanity

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SuAm

 

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One lesson. Two weeks. A hundred lives. Education saves lives.

Her name was Tilly Smith. And she was about to prove that a single school lesson could mean the difference between life and death.

On the morning of December 26, 2004, Tilly was walking along Mai Khao Beach in Phuket, Thailand, with her family. They were on their first overseas holiday together—a Christmas treat.

The beach was beautiful. The weather was perfect. But something was wrong.

Tilly noticed the water wasn't behaving normally.

"It wasn't calm and it wasn't going in and then out," she later recalled. "It was just coming in and in and in."

The sea had turned frothy—"like you get on a beer," she said. "It was sort of sizzling."

Any other 10-year-old might have thought it was strange. Tilly knew exactly what it meant.

Just two weeks earlier, in her geography class at Danes Hill School in Surrey, her teacher Andrew Kearney had shown the class black-and-white footage of the 1946 tsunami that devastated Hawaii. He taught them the warning signs: the sea receding unusually far, frothy bubbling water, the ocean behaving in ways it shouldn't.

Tilly was watching those exact warning signs unfold in front of her.

She started screaming at her parents. "There's going to be a tsunami!"

They didn't believe her. They couldn't see any wave. The sky was clear. The beach was calm.

But Tilly wouldn't stop. She became more insistent, more frantic.

"I'm going," she finally said. "I'm definitely going. There is definitely going to be a tsunami."

Her father Colin heard the urgency in her voice. He decided to trust his daughter.

By coincidence, an English-speaking Japanese man nearby overheard Tilly use the word "tsunami." He'd just heard news of an earthquake in Sumatra. "I think your daughter's right," he said.

Colin alerted the hotel staff. They began evacuating the beach immediately.

Tilly's mother Penny was one of the last to leave. She had to sprint as the water began rushing in behind her.

"I ran," Penny recalled, "and then I thought I was going to die."

They made it to the second floor of the hotel with seconds to spare.

Then the wave hit.

It was 30 feet tall.

Everything on the beach—beds, palm trees, debris—was swept into the swimming pool and beyond. "Even if you hadn't drowned," Penny later said, "you would have been hit by something."

The 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami killed over 230,000 people across 14 countries. Entire beaches in Phuket were wiped out. Thousands died.

But at Mai Khao Beach, not a single person was killed.

Because a 10-year-old girl paid attention in geography class.

Tilly was hailed as the "Angel of the Beach." She received the Thomas Gray Special Award from the Marine Society. She was named "Child of the Year" by a French magazine. She appeared at the United Nations and met Bill Clinton.

Her story is now taught in schools around the world as an example of why disaster education matters.

Her father Colin still thinks about what could have happened.

"If she hadn't told us, we would have just kept on walking," he said. "I'm convinced we would have died."

Tilly is now 30 years old. She lives in London and works in yacht chartering.

She still credits her geography teacher, Andrew Kearney.

"If it wasn't for Mr. Kearney," she told the United Nations, "I'd probably be dead and so would my family."

Two weeks. One lesson. One hundred lives.

That's the power of education.

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