Highest Duty_ My Search for What Really Matters - Chesley B. Sullenberger [97]
“Please,” Herman’s mother pleaded. “Let our family stay together.”
“You can stay together if you’d like,” the embassy clerk told them. “If you want to stay here in Austria, you can be together. If the three of you want to go, you can go. It’s your choice.”
The family made a decision. Herman’s father would stay behind. Herman, his sister, and his mother would escape to the United States, where life would be safer for them. The three of them arrived here in August 1939, and not long after that, Herman’s father was transported to Buchenwald concentration camp. He was murdered there in February 1940.
Almost seventy years later, Herman watched the rescue of Flight 1549 unfold, and it was, in part, these difficult memories that compelled him to call his daughter, Bracha. Afterward, Bracha continued to think about the connections between me and her father, and she reached out to me with her letter.
She wrote of Herman’s great reverence for life, forged through the Holocaust. She also wrote that her father was lucky that our flight found safety in the river, as opposed to crashing into buildings in Manhattan.
“Had you not been so skilled and such a lover of life,” she wrote, “my father or others like him, in their sky-high buildings, could have perished along with your passengers. As a Holocaust survivor, my father taught me that to save a life is to save the world.”
She explained to me the Jewish view that if you save one person, you never know what he or she might go on to accomplish, or how his or her progeny might contribute to peace and healing in the world. “May you know the joy of having saved generations of people,” Bracha wrote, “allowing them the possibility of humanitarianism such as yours. Bless you, Captain Sullenberger.”
Her letter continues to move and inspire me. I feel honored that she viewed the landing of the plane in the Hudson as “a powerful commitment to life.” She’s right: I don’t know the good things still to be accomplished by the 154 people on my flight. I can’t fathom what contributions might be made to the world by their children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren yet to be born.
THERE WERE those who wrote to say they agreed with me: I am not a hero. I appreciated the ways they spoke to me. They wrote to say that preparation and diligence are not the same as heroism.
“In your interviews, you seemed uncomfortable being called a hero,” wrote Paul Kellen of Medford, Massachusetts. “I also found the title inappropriate. I see a hero as electing to enter a dangerous situation for a higher purpose, and you were not given a choice. That is not to say you are not a man of virtue, but I see your virtue arising from your choices at other times. It is clear you take your professional responsibilities seriously. It is clear that many of the choices in your life prepared you for that moment when your engines failed.
“There are people among us who are ethical, responsible, and diligent. I think there are many of them. You might have toiled in obscurity were it not for an ill-timed meeting with a flock of birds.
“I hope your story encourages those many others who toil in obscurity to know that their reward is simple—they will be ready if the test comes. I do not mean to diminish your achievement. I just want to point out that when the challenge sounded, you had thoroughly prepared yourself. I hope your story encourages others to imitation.”
I heard from more than a few people who lost loved ones in accidents, or who survived accidents themselves. Some of these tragedies involved airplanes.
People wrote of how they had found the courage to return to flying, mostly because they had resolved to trust the professionals in the cockpit.
Karen Kaiser Clark of St. Paul, Minnesota, wrote to me about Delta Air Lines Flight 191, which crashed in Dallas on August