Heroes did what was needed
Published: February 28, 2007
They’re ordinary people who have done extraordinary things.
The six honorees at Saturday’s Florida Holocaust Museum annual fundraiser - “To Life, To Heroes, To Courage” is this year’s theme - include a homemaker, a retired businessman, a soldier, a security officer and an engineer. Actor Jon Voight, a museum board member, will be the master of ceremonies. Paul Rusesabagina, the real-life hero of the movie Hotel Rwanda, is one of the honorees and the guest speaker. The moments that defined the others as heroes:
Kerry Reardon
Reardon was supposed to be fishing that day, but his buddies hadn’t caught any bait so they pulled out of the tournament.
Instead, the St. Petersburg man took his 15-year-old daughter out for a highway driving lesson. He let her choose the direction. She headed for the Howard Frankland Bridge.
Mujo and Amira Jakupovic and their sons Emrah, 13, and Amar, 7, were on the bridge, too. About 200 yards from the bridge’s end, their left rear tire blew, sending the car over the side and into the water.
When the Reardons got to that stretch, Kerry saw the skid marks and the glass. “I knew that somebody had gone over,” said Reardon, 44, an engineer.
Amira, who had made it out of the vehicle with her husband and older son, was screaming for Amar. Reardon, an experienced diver, knew he had to help.
“I knew that time was of the essence,” he said. “I went down and it was really murky and fortunately I found the crushed window and I went to the back seat and he was still slumped in it and his eyes were open and he was blue. It’s something you never want to see. I grabbed his shirt and grabbed him toward me, then I swam up to the top with him and gave him a quick breath. And there was a police officer who did a lot of CPR on the shore.”
That was Nov. 5, 2005.
Sam Schryver
Schryver knew he had to act that April day in 1945.
He was imprisoned with nearly 900 others in the Westerbork concentration camp in Holland, and his instincts told him that something terrible was about to happen. Their Nazi captors had ordered them to stop work and head to the barracks in the middle of the day. Anyone who disobeyed would be shot.
Schryver, who is Jewish and lost most of his family during the Holocaust, knew the Allies were near and suspected the Nazis wanted to kill the prisoners before they retreated. He decided to escape.
He clearly remembers the terrifying journey. “You’re walking, you’re crawling, you’re going through bushes, you lay low,” said Schryver, 84, who was born in Holland and now divides his time between Clearwater and Montreal.
As he came out of a canal, he was confronted by Canadian soldiers who accused him of being a Nazi collaborator. They didn’t believe that Westerbork was filled with prisoners. The camp, they said, was about to be destroyed.
“If you do so, ” he told them, “after the war, I will hold you responsible for taking the lives of about 900 innocent people, unless you kill me now.”
Forty-five years later, the man Schryver confronted that night would write: “As I was suspicious of Mr. Schryver’s story, I sent him with a six-man patrol to verify. The patrol found everything he said was true. Indeed, due to his intervention, total annihilation of Westerbork and its approximate 1,000 inmates was prevented.”
“I escaped to save my own life and in the process of doing so, I saved the 876,” said Schryver, a retired businessman.
Sophal Stagg
Stagg, 41, will never forget the day she arrived in America: Oct. 22, 1980.
But even as she settled down to live her dream with her American husband, Bill, and their children, she couldn’t forget the privation and killings she left in Cambodia. Between 1975 and 1979, an estimated 2-million to 3-million people perished in her homeland, victims of the Communist Khmer Rouge.
As a child, Stagg was separated from her parents and siblings and forced to work 16-hour days in rice paddies. To survive, she ate mice and crickets.
“It’s always inside of me,” the Palm Harbor homemaker said. “The day that I left, I always see the people left behind. The children standing and watching me leave.”
She and her husband formed the nonprofit Southeast Asian Children’s Mercy Fund, which provides food, medicine and other necessities for about 450 Cambodian children and their families each year.
Maj. David Rozelle
Rozelle was commanding 140 troops of the 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment in Iraq when he lost part of his right leg to a land mine.
He was sent to Walter Reed Medical Center in Washington, D.C.
“I didn’t stay in the hospital very long,” Rozelle said. “I was home within the first six weeks and back in command within six months and back in Iraq within 18 months,” he said.
Rozelle has the distinction of being the first to return to lead his troops after losing a leg in battle.
It was a decision motivated by patriotism and brotherhood, said Rozelle, who was injured in June 2003.
“I think that there’s a real unique feeling that American soldiers have when their country is at war. They feel a real obligation to their country, to their unit, the need to protect America,” he said. “I’m no different from any other soldier that feels the call of war, to get back in and fight.”
After returning from Iraq, he asked to be assigned to Walter Reed, where he is in charge of building an amputee care center.
Jason Thomas
Thomas, a former Marine sergeant, was dropping his daughters at his mom’s house on Sept. 11, 2001, when she told him about the attack. “I immediately ran to my car, put on my uniform and started to Ground Zero,” he said. “I got there just in time to see the second tower collapse.”
Thomas, 33, helped put out fires and rescue people from nearby buildings. He prayed over the dead.
Later, he and another Marine worked to find survivors.
“I didn’t see anyone conducting a search and rescue. We decided to crawl across the pile of rubble, and as we would move along, we would shout down every hole, ‘This is the United States Marines. We’re here to rescue you,’ ” said Thomas, who is now a security officer living in Ohio with his family.
They were more than halfway across the rubble when he heard a small voice. Using their hands and flashlights, they tried to dig out the two trapped police officers, who were later featured in Oliver Stone’s movie World Trade Center.
That someone might consider him a hero didn’t occur to him until he saw the movie trailer; his family encouraged him to speak up. The man who portrayed him in the movie is white. Thomas is black. But he’s not upset about being overlooked. He was only there to help.
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