It was the summer of 1944, and 6-year-old Ervin Staub and his family, like other Jews in Budapest, were being set apart from their neighbors by laws imposed by the Nazis. Food was strictly rationed, and Ervin's 13-year-old cousin Eva, desperate to get a loaf of bread for her family, was waiting in a long bakery line after the curfew for Jews and without the yellow Star of David she was supposed to wear.

“Someone pointed her out as a Jew, and three young thugs tried to take her away,” said Dr. Staub, now a psychologist at the University of Massachusetts, who vividly recalls the incident. “But she ran into our house to hide, and my aunt yelled at the thugs with such defiance that she scared them away.”

That summer, members of the Staub family were given protective identity papers by Raoul Wallenberg, the Swedish ambassador who used the documents to shelter tens of thousands of Jews from the Nazis. Ervin's father had already been imprisoned in a Nazi labor camp, but was emboldened to try an escape when a close family servant smuggled the Swedish papers to him in the camp. He succeeded and hid in the house undetected until the end of the war.

“What happened to me as a child in Hungary has left me with a lifelong mission to get people to respond to those who need help,” said Dr. Staub, who still speaks with a Hungarian accent, with luxuriantly rolled R's and sibilant S's.