Marlene Wagman-Geller

In 1970, the quintessential hippie, Janis Joplin, crooned, “Oh Lord won’t you buy me a Mercedes Benz…” In all probability, Joplin did not know the strange story that lay behind the iconic car, that the christening involved an insidious irony. 

“How far that little candle throws its beams! So shines a good deed in a weary world.”   
– William Shakespeare The Merchant of Venice

Living under the reign of terror results in the milk of human kindness or acts of brutality. During the dark days of the Holocaust, some individuals sheltered their Jewish neighbors; others turned a blind eye to the hapless. History has enshrined the names of the Righteous of the era when mankind buried its humanity.  Raoul Wallenberg of Sweden saved the Jews of Hungary; Irene Sendler of Poland rescued children from the Warsaw Ghetto, Miep Gies of Holland helped the families hiding in the Secret Annex.  An unsung hero was a girl who, enmeshed in a spider’s web, proved that in an era where the norm was random acts of madness, there could still exist random acts of kindness.  

“It’s a Man’s Man’s Man’s World” is a song James Brown recorded in a New York studio in 1966, and, given the era in which he wrote, his words rang true. A map of Manhattan illustrates that men shaped the city and left behind their names as their calling cards. 

In 1953, Edmund Hillary stood where heaven meets earth, a feat that made him the first man to scale Mt. Everest. Fifty-four years later, a woman who shared his surname also achieved a historical first, all the more remarkable as she did so in her seventh decade.