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his death, he was nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize.

      21 January

      Hildegard Goss-Mayr

      22 January 1930—

      Marked for Peace

      In 1942, twelve-year-old Hildegard Mayr witnessed the growing terror in Vienna as communists, pacifists, and Jews were arrested and taken away by Nazi thugs. Even her own parents, both Catholic pacifists, were under surveillance. But despite the danger facing her whole family, she refused to go along with the “Heil Hitler!” waves of jubilation that swept over her fellow students every time another Wehrmacht victory was announced. As she recalled, “I felt a huge force pressing on me . . . and I said to myself, ‘you have to resist . . . don’t raise your hand even if they lynch you.’” This will to resist the evil of violence, developed at so young an age, marked her for life. She knew even then that she had to choose between “the forces of death and the spirit of revenge, or the forces of life that are able to overcome evil at its root.” She chose life and nonviolence.

      Hildegard and her family managed to survive the terrible Nazi years, and she went on to study philosophy in France and the United States, eventually earning a doctorate. She joined the International Fellowship of Reconciliation in 1953, a year before she married Jean Goss, a World War II combat veteran turned pacifist. The couple traveled around the world, teaching nonviolence and conflict resolution to laypeople, nuns, and priests in such countries as Brazil, Mexico, and the Philippines. Whether opposing the Cold War nuclear doctrine of mutually assured destruction (MAD) in the 1960s, working in Africa in the 1970s in the struggle against colonialism, or being arrested in Brazil in 1975 for teaching firmeza permanente, a tactic similar to Gandhi’s practice of meeting violence with persistent firmness, Goss-Mayr and her husband were at the forefront of peace work in the second half of the twentieth century.

      A regular feature of Goss-Mayr’s approach to teaching peace was to remind her students that peace was as much an inner attitude as an external change in policy or economic and social structures. Without the cultivation of both, neither was possible in the long run. As she said in 1984 while helping Filipinos devise nonviolent strategies to end President Ferdinand Marcos’s repressive regime, “The seed of violence is in the structure, of course, and in the dictator. But isn’t it also in ourselves? It’s very easy to say that Marcos is the evil. But unless we each tear the dictator out of our own heart, nothing will change.”

      Her husband and coworker, Jean, died in 1991. Goss-Mayr continues to train peaceworkers in nonviolence and to advocate for justice, proving herself, as fellow peace worker John Dear says, “the greatest living peacemaker.”

      22 January

      U Thant

      22 January 1909—25 November 1974

      Searching for Peaceful Coexistence

      On a September night in 1961, Dag Hammarskjöld, Secretary-General of the United Nations, died in a plane crash while on his way to negotiate a ceasefire between warring factions in what was then called Northern Rhodesia. Hammarskjöld had an international reputation. His successor, a soft-spoken Buddhist from Burma (now Myanmar) named U Thant, was unknown. But he would lead the United Nations with grace and skill during a decade of worldwide strife.

      The son of a wealthy landowner and merchant, Thant was educated at the prestigious National High School in his native land and went on to study at University College in Rangoon. Upon graduation, he returned to teach at his alma mater and was appointed headmaster when he was only twenty-five. During his years as a school administrator, he became actively involved in Burma’s struggle for independence from Great Britain. He struck up a working acquaintance and then friendship with U Nu, who became the first prime minister of independent Burma in 1947. Once in office, Nu assigned Thant to several government posts before appointing him Burma’s permanent delegate to the United Nations in 1957.

      Thant once said that as a Buddhist, he was “trained to be tolerant of everything except intolerance.” His quiet manner and unassailable integrity gave him the authority to navigate tangled political crises during his tenure as UN Secretary-General. He was instrumental in defusing the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis and in ending the first civil war in the Congo (1960–1966). He opposed the apartheid policy of South Africa and, frustrated by the hawkish posture of President Lyndon Johnson’s administration toward Vietnam, unsuccessfully tried to engage Washington and Hanoi in peace talks. He was also a guiding force in helping establish UN environmental and development programs.

      One of the convictions that guided U Thant’s leadership of the UN was his belief that a different kind of war needed to be fought, one that was waged nonviolently for secure and peaceful coexistence rather than conquest. “Two world wars were fought to make the world safe for democracy,” he told the General Assembly in 1964. “Today we have to wage a war on all fronts. This war has to be waged in peace time, but it has to be waged as energetically and with as much total national effort as in times of war. The war we have to wage today has only one goal, and that is to make the world safe for diversity. The concept of peaceful coexistence has been criticized by many who do not see the need to make the world safe for diversity. I wonder if they have ever paused to ask themselves the question: What is the alternative to coexistence?” In many ways, the search for peaceful coexistence was the ruling principle of U Thant’s public life.

      23 January

      María Julia Hernández

      30 January 1939—30 March 2007

      Remembering the Slain

      In the feature film Romero about the life and martyrdom of El Salvadoran Archbishop Óscar Romero, there’s a poignant scene in which the relatives of “disappeared” victims of death squads line up to look at hundreds of photographs of corpses to see if their missing loved ones are among them. They dread finding them—but they need to know what happened to them. And if they discover that their loved ones are among the slain, they want justice.

      The scene isn’t a cinematic invention. María Julia Hernández actually compiled a photographic encyclopedia of the victims of the civil war in El Salvador that claimed some seventy-five thousand lives between 1978 and 1992. Death squads and military units loyal to the ruling junta kidnapped, tortured, raped, and killed thousands of ordinary people whom they suspected of loyalty to the leftist guerrillas defying the government. For their part, the guerrillas also carried out kidnappings and killings of people whom they thought loyal to the government. Every morning maimed corpses could be found on the streets of San Salvador, dumped overnight by right-wing death squads or leftist guerillas. Often their faces were burned with battery acid to delay identification of them.

      After he became archbishop in 1977, Óscar Romero asked Hernández, then a law professor at the University of Central America, to help him document the atrocities. Romero was murdered three years later, and Hernández herself received regular death threats during the next decade; she began each day by praying, “Well, God, will I see you today, or will you leave me a bit longer, fighting?” But she persevered in her advocacy for the disappeared and the slain, eventually putting together a catalogue of the dead that contained several thousand photos. She was the first to break the news about the 1981 El Mozote Massacre in which nearly eight hundred peasant men, women, and children were abused and slaughtered by government forces. Eight years later, she was one of the lead investigators of the murder of six Jesuit priests at the university where she once taught. As the Human Rights Officer for the Roman Catholic Diocese of San Salvador, she pestered the government to investigate these and other murders and to prosecute those responsible. When the civil war ended in 1991, Hernández hoped that justice would finally be served. But the government issued a general amnesty for all participants in the long conflict. Hernández, undeterred, campaigned to overturn the amnesty.

      Her dedication to chronicling human rights abuses in El Salvador and seeking justice for victims was unshakable. An intensely religious woman, Hernández never married, lived simply, and worked out of a sparse office decorated with a photograph of Romero, a man whom she loved and admired. She once described her vocation as a “mission to

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