1Vance Flosenzier
In 2001, when a Florida man named Vance Flosenzier noticed that a 7-foot-long shark had his 8-year-old nephew Jesse Arbogast by the arm, he grabbed onto the shark and wrestled the animal barehanded out of the water, while others freed Jesse and brought him to shore. He wrestled the shark for more than 10 minutes to keep it away from other children. Then they killed the shark and pried it open to retrieve Jesse's severed arm, which the surgeons were able to reattach.
2. The world's largest seed bank, which botanist Nikolai Vavilov established, was located in Leningrad in 1941 during the siege of the city. As the Germans surrounded the city, forcing mass starvation, nine Soviet scientists refused to eat from the collection. They slowly died of hunger as they maintained 16 rooms of edible plants and refused to destroy "the future of Russia." The potato seeds they had in there would then go on to help spawn the world's current blight-free potato stock.
3. Despite intense Nazi surveillance during World War II, a Catholic priest named Don Arrigo Beccari managed to smuggle 120 Jewish children to safety. When the Nazis captured him and tortured him for months, he still kept quiet. He was recognized as "Righteous Among the Nations" in 1964.
4. On September 11, 2001, Officer John Perry of the NYPD went to headquarters to file his retirement paperwork. When he heard the explosion at the World Trade Center, he went there right away. Later, when one of the towers fell, he was killed. He was the only off-duty officer to be killed on 9/11.
5. After the 2011 Japanese nuclear plant in Fukushima was disabled by an earthquake and tsunami double whammy, elderly Japanese people volunteered to do repairs to save young people from radiation exposure.
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6Anthony Omari
In 2012, Anthony Omari took a machete to the face from attacking robbers while defending an under-resourced Kenyan orphanage his family runs. He saved 37 orphans that day. The attack was in revenge for the previously foiled robbery, when Anthony threw a hammer at one of the thieves.
7. In 2009, four prisoners at the Hillsborough County Jail in Florida saved a corrections officer from another prisoner. The inmates who rescued him were in prison for assault, armed robbery, home invasion, murder, and sex offenses, but they saved the deputy because he treated them like human beings.
8. At least twice, CNN correspondent Sanjay Gupta has been on location reporting but needed to step in as a neurosurgeon: once on a Marine in Iraq and the other on a little girl injured during the Haitian earthquake. The Marine was shot in the head during the opening days of the invasion of Iraq. Without proper tools, Gupta performed the brain surgery with a Black and Decker handheld drill. The Marine lived.
9. In 2015, MMA fighter Matt Hamill noticed a car speeding down the wrong side of the highway. So he turned around, chased the car, and safely forced it into a grassy area. He then punched out a window to stop the car, potentially saving the child passenger's and the inebriated mother's lives.
10. Richard Zednik, the goalie for the Buffalo Sabres, had his carotid artery cut by another player's skate in 1989. This caused him to lose so much blood that eleven fans passed out, two more had heart attacks, and three players threw up on the ice. The team trainer rushed onto the ice, reached into his wound, and simply pinched the artery with his fingers until additional help arrived, saving his life.
11Iqbal Masih
Iqbal Masih was a kid in Pakistan who was sold into bondage. At the age of 10, he escaped the shackles of bonded labor, freeing over 3000 children who were trapped in the same carpet factory he worked in. He was responsible for bringing down Pakistan's carpet exports by $34 million and was therefore murdered in 1995 at the age of 13.
12. In 1907, a Mexican railroad brakeman named Jesús Gracía saved the entire town of Nacozari by single-handedly driving a damaged and burning train containing dynamite six kilometers away from the town before it finally exploded, killing him.
13. In 2009, an Italian neurosurgeon named Claudio Vitale had a heart attack while performing surgery on a patient. He kept going when he realized that if he stopped, his patient would never recover. Half an hour after finishing the surgery, the doctor underwent an angioplasty.
14. Actor Robert Patrick was involved in a boating accident on Lake Erie in 1984. He nearly drowned after swimming for nearly 3 hours while helping to rescue the other people stranded at the accident site.
15. During the Chernobyl meltdown, Oleksander Lelechenko was the deputy chief of the electrical shop. To keep his younger coworkers from being exposed to radiation, he himself went through radioactive water and debris three times to make emergency repairs. After receiving first aid, he again returned to the plant and worked for several more hours. He died in a Kiev hospital less than two weeks after the disaster.
16Ghulam Dastagir
A stationmaster named Ghulam Dastagir at the Bhopal railway station refused to leave his post during the 1984 Bhopal Gas Tragedy. He prevented any trains from stopping at the station, saving thousands of lives even as his colleagues started dying around him. He survived the disaster, but spent the next two decades in and out of hospitals as a result of his prolonged exposure to the gas.
17. During the Rwandan Genocide, an old Rwandan woman named Zura Karuhimbi saved the lives of over 100 Tutsis by hiding them in her home and scaring away Hutus by pretending to be a witch and saying her home was haunted and full of ghosts.
18. Shavarsh Karapetyan, a 17-time world swimming champion from Armenia, was on a 12-mile run in 1976 when he heard a crash and saw a bus sink into a lake. He dove 33 feet deep, rescuing 20 people, one at a time, from the frigid and sewage-infested water. His career as a professional swimmer ended after this heroic act due to two-sided pneumonia and blood contamination that put him in a coma. This didn't stop him from saving more people nine years later, when he rushed into a burning hospital to save people trapped inside. He suffered severe burns during the rescue.
19. An Italian security guard named Pierlucio Tinazzi is credited with saving 10 people from the 1999 Mont Blanc Tunnel fire. He donned breathing equipment and drove into the tunnel on his motorcycle. It was later found melted into the pavement. He died attempting to rescue a truck driver after dragging his unconscious body behind a fire door.
20. In 2001, breast milk from a woman named Faustina Mercedes saved 16 people lost at sea. Two days after their food ran out, she told her sister to try her milk. She felt better and offered it to everyone else. The 8 men and 7 women took turns sucking her breasts and were able to survive for 7 more days until currents pushed the boat to shore.
21Bishnu Shrestha
In 2010, a retired Gurkha soldier of the Indian Army, Bishnu Shrestha, was returning to his village in a train when it was hijacked by armed robbers. When they tried to rape a young teen in front of him, he brandished his Kukri blade and attacked all 40 captors. He managed to kill three men and injure eight before he was subdued. The rest of the robbers quickly panicked and dispersed.
22. Welles Crowther was a 24-year-old equities trader who saved 12 people during the 911 attacks and went back in to save more before never being seen again.
23. Miki Endo, a Japanese emergency worker, saved thousands of lives during the 2011 Tohoku earthquake and tsunami by warning the people of Minamisanriku via the Emergency Broadcast System. She did not leave her spot and was eventually killed in the subsequent disaster.
24. Leroy Colombo was a deaf lifeguard who overcame being paralyzed as a child by swimming. He saved more than 900 lives in his career, which is a record. His swimming talent and use of sight rather than sound to identify drowning swimmers allowed him to save people other lifeguards would have missed.
25. Vince Coleman was a railway dispatcher in Halifax during the 1917 Great Halifax Explosion. He gave up his life in order to warn an incoming train of an imminent explosion. His telegraph said, "Hold up the train. Ammunition ship afire in harbor making for Pier 6 and will explode. Guess this will be my last message. Good-bye boys." He saved 300 lives.
