In November 1938, a sixteen-year-old Jewish girl named Hilde Back arrived in Sweden, alone, on a train from Germany. Her parents were not with her. The Swedish government had agreed to accept only Jewish refugee children, not their parents. Hilde’s mother and father remained behind in Boizenburg, Germany, a country whose laws had already barred their daughter from school. Her father, Salomon Back, and mother, Margot Back, would both die in Auschwitz. Hilde would survive because Sweden, and the Swedish strangers who took her in, had intervened.

Hilde lived a quiet life after World War II. She became a kindergarten teacher and then a school inspector in Västerås, a modest city about an hour west of Stockholm. She lived in a small apartment — never married — never had children of her own.

In the early 1970s, she signed up for a child sponsorship program. The agreement was that for fifteen dollars a school term, a Swedish sponsor could keep a child she had never met enrolled in a school somewhere else in the world. Hilde, on her small teacher’s salary, sent fifteen dollars a term for years. She wouldn’t learn the full consequences of her gifts for almost three decades.

The child on the other end was a Kenyan boy named Chris Mburu. He lived in a mud hut in rural Kenya, a district where almost no children continued past primary school. His family could not afford the fees required to keep him enrolled. He had been the top student in his district for years and was, by every metric the schools used, headed for a future of picking coffee unless someone intervened.  What intervened was Hilde Back’s fifteen dollars each term.

Hilde and Chris exchanged letters over the years. She asked about his studies, his teachers, his dreams. He came to understand that behind the impersonal monthly transfer there was a certain woman in a city he could not find on a map; somewhere a teacher who had decided that his education mattered to her.

Chris graduated. He went to the University of Nairobi for law. He then continued to Harvard Law School for a Master of Laws. He joined the United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, where he has worked, for decades, on accountability for genocide and other international crimes. He has spent his professional career in the institutions that holds the worst of human violence imaginable to legal account.

For most of those years, Chris had never properly thanked the woman who paid the fifteen dollars. He didn’t know how to find her.  So in 2001, Chris and a group of Kenyan colleagues founded a scholarship program in Kenya for academically talented children from impoverished families — children, just like himself. He wanted to name the fund after Hilde. He knew her name. He did not know where she was.

With help from the Swedish embassy, Chris found her. She was alive and in her late seventies. She still lived in Västerås. She was, by every account, an ordinary retired teacher who had once sent a Kenyan child a small amount of money for a long time. When Chris and the Swedish delegation came to thank Hilde, she was baffled. It was merely fifteen dollars, she said.

In 2003, Hilde traveled to Kenya for the inauguration of the Hilde Back Education Fund. Villagers welcomed her with songs and dances. She was named an honorary village elder. Children whose secondary educations the fund had begun underwriting stood in lines to greet her.

Then there was the next chapter of the story. Filmmaker Jennifer Arnold began making a film about Hilde and Chris in the years that followed. The film, A Small Act, aired on HBO in 2010. In the course of researching it, Arnold pieced together more of Hilde’s own history than Chris had previously known. The full story of her arrival in Sweden in 1938, story of her parents in Boizenburg, and the full story of the family that had been destroyed.

A Holocaust survivor, a Jewish child rescued by strangers, her parents murdered, had, decades later, quietly arranged the rescue, through education, of an African boy who would grow up to fight the legal architecture of genocide. When Chris saw and understood the full scope of what had happened, he wept.

Hilde returned to Kenya in 2012 to celebrate her ninetieth birthday surrounded by students the fund had educated. Asked if she thought of Chris as a son, she said only that she had been a teacher. She had had, she said, many children. She died in Västerås on January 12, 2021, at the age of ninety-eight.

By then, the Hilde Back Education Fund had carried close to a thousand Kenyan students through secondary school. Many of those students have gone on to fund others, through a continuation initiative called A Small Act “Jamii” being the Swahili word for community.

This is how grace moves through history. Quietly — person to person — almost always unseen by the people involved at the time. Yes, a girl arrived in Sweden in 1938 because strangers had intervened. The boy she helped, fifty years later, intervenes still.

Mark 12:41-44: ^“Jesus sat down opposite the place where the offerings were put and watched the crowd putting their money into the temple treasury. Many rich people threw in large amounts. But a poor widow came and put in two very small copper coins, worth only a few cents. Calling his disciples to him, Jesus said, ‘Truly I tell you, this poor widow has put more into the treasury than all the others. They all gave out of their wealth; but she, out of her poverty, put in everything—all she had to live on.’”

Tagged: parenting, world war II