Saving Strangers

"Saving Strangers” tells the story of Volker Heinz, who, at the height of the Cold War, risked having his life destroyed to smuggle more than sixty people to freedom from oppression under East Germany’s totalitarian regime, two at a time, over many months. He was twenty-two. Nobody made him do it. The scheme was audacious and dangerous in the extreme, but he kept it going and it worked - until it didn’t.

He faced the consequences of his moral choice when he was captured and imprisoned by the secret police. How and why he positioned himself at the center of the plot, despite the known risk of its eventual failure, poses a question: Why do certain people help total strangers when they know it will put them squarely in harm’s way?