I think Sophie would be very happy to know that almost a hundred years later, people still know her and know her story just from seeing a picture. And of course that everything she was saying was vindicated, everyone who killed her had to flee or be captured or killed before the blink of an eye had passed, and the regime she was speaking against is now remembered worldwide as some of the century’s greatest scumbags. Out of everyone else in the picture, no one has any clue who the other people are, or has any reason to try to find out.

There’s a similar story I think in “Patriots.” Norman Morrison was the man who burned himself alive outside the Pentagon to protest the Vietnam War. Years and years later, either his wife or daughter (I think wife) got to visit Vietnam, and travel around, and at some point early on, she was talking to a group of Vietnamese people about why she was visiting. They all knew who she was. Right away. They all knew Morrison’s story, they’d learned about it in school. She got to talk with someone who was alive during the war, who heard what he’d done at the time, and who told her about how incredibly powerfully it had impacted him. Their whole perception of the US military was as this towering invulnerable robot that had come to lay waste to their entire country. He had learned, at the time while it was still going on, that in the absolute heart of the machine there were still human beings who were willing to give up their lives to try to stop the mechanisms, who cared that powerfully about people they’d never met, never seen, didn’t know the names of, but still were fighting with everything they had to try to protect them and stop all their suffering.