Shelves

Stories about courage

Ordinary people who were brave when it mattered most.

14 stories

KindnessTrue story

The Names in the Jar

In occupied Warsaw, social worker Irena Sendler helped smuggle Jewish children out of the ghetto, and buried their real names in jars so they could one day be found.

4 min readAges 12+1940s
KindnessTrue story

The Man Who Saved 669 Children

In 1938 a young London stockbroker cancelled a skiing holiday and went to Prague instead. He told almost nobody what he did there, for fifty years.

4 min readAges 10+1930s
True StoriesTrue story

Landing on the River

In January 2009, a passenger jet lost both engines minutes after take-off from New York. The pilots had about three and a half minutes to decide what to do.

3 min readAges 10+2000s
True StoriesTrue story

Thirteen in the Cave

In June 2018, twelve boys from a Thai football team and their coach were trapped by floodwater deep inside a cave. The world came together to bring them out.

3 min readAges 10+2010s
True StoriesTrue story

The 33 Under the Desert

In August 2010, a mine collapsed in Chile's Atacama Desert, trapping 33 men 700 metres underground. For seventeen days, nobody knew if they were alive.

4 min readAges 10+2010s
True StoriesTrue story

The Girl Who Fell from the Sky

On Christmas Eve 1971, a plane broke apart over the Amazon rainforest. Seventeen-year-old Juliane Koepcke fell three kilometres, still strapped to her seat, and survived.

4 min readAges 12+1970s
KindnessHistorical narrative

Carols in No Man's Land

At Christmas 1914, in the first winter of the First World War, soldiers on opposite sides of the trenches laid down their weapons and met as human beings, if only for a little while.

3 min readAges 10+1910s
HistoryHistorical narrative

The Mission That Came Home

In April 1970, an explosion left three astronauts nearly 200,000 miles from Earth in a damaged spacecraft. What followed was one of the greatest problem-solving efforts in history.

4 min readAges 10+1970s
True StoriesTrue story

The Little Ships of Dunkirk

In 1940, hundreds of thousands of soldiers were trapped on the beaches of northern France. To help bring them home, an extraordinary fleet set out across the Channel, of fishing boats, ferries, yachts and pleasure launches.

4 min readAges 10+1940s
KindnessTrue story

The Visas of Chiune Sugihara

In the summer of 1940, a crowd of desperate refugees gathered at the gate of a small Japanese consulate in Lithuania. The diplomat inside had to choose between his orders and his conscience.

4 min readAges 12+1940s
KindnessTrue story

The Village That Hid Children

During the Second World War, the people of a poor mountain village in France opened their doors to strangers on the run. They hid thousands, and hardly ever spoke of it afterwards.

4 min readAges 12+1940s
True StoriesTrue story

The Race to Nome

In the winter of 1925, a deadly illness broke out in a small town in Alaska, cut off by snow and ice. The medicine that could stop it was nearly a thousand kilometres away. Only dogs could bring it.

4 min readAges 8+1920s
SportsBiography

Four Golds in Berlin

The grandson of enslaved people, born to a poor farming family in Alabama, went to the 1936 Olympic Games in Hitler's Germany and won four gold medals.

4 min readAges 10+1910s–1930s
EpicsClassic retold

Hanuman and the Mountain

Lakshmana lies badly wounded on the battlefield, and only a healing herb from a far-off mountain can save him before sunrise. Hanuman flies north to fetch it. But when he gets there, he can't tell which herb is the right one.

3 min readAges 6+The Ramayana