From World War 2

The story of Fr. Maximillian Kolbe, a Polish Catholic priest who with four monasty companions was imprisoned at Auschwitz.

When a prisoner went missing (his body was later found stuffed into a latrine), the Nazi guards selected ten prisoners to death as a reprisal - they would be sent to a strarvation hut where they would slowly die.

One of the men selected exclaimed in grief at the prospects for his family if he were to be killed, and Fr. Kolbe volunteered to receive the man's punishment in his place.

He and four other prisoners took too long to die, and the guards needed the cell for other purposes, so a Polish trustee injected them with lethal doses of carbolic acid. The man Fr. Kolbe saved survived, and lived to the age of 95. Kolbe was beatified a Saint by Pope John Paul II.

http://www.auschwitz.dk/kolbe.htm

Miracle rescue 9 days after Japan earthquake

An 80 year-old grandmother and her 16 year-old grandson were found suffering from hypothermia but otherwise unharmed nine days after an earthquake and tsunami destroyed their home in the Miyagi prefecture city of Ishinomaki.

More than 20,000 people are dead or missing in the devastation from a 9.0 earthquake and tsunami on March 11 but Sumi Abe and her grandson Jin Abe managed to survive the bitter cold in the wreckage of their home for over a week.

The two, who were in the kitchen when the quake struck, survived on yogourt, Coca-Cola and water from the refrigerator, media are reporting.

Miyagi prefecture was the hardest hit of the Japanese prefectures with a confirmed death toll of 4,882.