Diane Stanley: Hi, my name is Diane Stanley, and I am the author of Resist!: Peaceful Acts That Changed our World. I have spent a good part of my career writing long 48-page picture book biographies of individuals who were important and who seemed interesting to me. I noticed in the last few years, I would read an article or hear something on NPR about Gandhi or Martin Luther King, Jr. or Cesar Chavez or some great leader of non-violent resistance movements. And it occurred to me that it would be really kind of wonderful to take a step back from a particular person or a particular movement, and write about the idea behind those movements. So I could highlight how many different ways there are to work peacefully to bring about positive change, and that the whole variety of people from the past, from the present, children, old people, fighting for a huge variety of different causes have brought about so much change in a peaceful way. And that they've sort of built on each other, become a really kind of dynamic story of an idea.

Choosing the people was something of a challenge, partly because they were way too many, and we only had so many pages, and we had to take some out. I wanted to cover as many different movements as possible. And sometimes you had to have multiple people in movements, such as the women's rights and civil rights, which are stories that never seem to end. We make progress, but we never get to the final wonderful place. We always have to have new people who are willing to take a stand on those particular causes.

I definitely wanted young people where I could find them, and I did. I mean, Ryan White, Claudette Colvin, Greta Thunberg, the Parkland students. And I also wanted people from around the world.

One of the things that surprised me was how very effective civil disobedience or non-violent resistance is. And they've actually looked at the data and found that it's more effective than riots and wars and the violent ways of bringing about change.

I would like to share a part of one of the chapters from Resist!: Peaceful Acts that Changed our World. And I selected this one because she's someone who was so important that very few people know about her. She was a social worker living in Poland during the Nazi invasion, and part of her job was to go into the Warsaw Ghetto to check inmates for contagious diseases. The Nazis were concerned about that, of course, not because they cared about the people in the Ghetto, but because they were afraid it might spread beyond the Ghetto.

What she found was horrendous, that thousands were dying every month from sickness and starvation. She remembered how her father, a doctor, had treated his poorest patients for free. He did this, he explained, because if a man is drowning, one must help him. Irena saw the suffering in the Ghetto as exactly that kind of emergency. Everyone there was drowning. And since she couldn't possibly save them all, she determined to rescue the children. For the next 18 months, Irena and her helpers went to the Ghetto every day and they never left without at least one child.