Why Amazing Grace? If you’ve ever sung the hymn Amazing Grace, you’ve sung the words of the man who was Wilberforce’s mentor, John Newton.  In the words of Wilberforce’s biographer, Eric Metaxas, in an interview with National Review Online’s Katharine Jean Lopez:

…Newton’s greatest achievement — greater than writing that world-famous hymn — may have been when he advised the newly converted Wilberforce not to leave politics, but to stay there so that God could use him there. It’s to his endless credit that Newton advised Wilberforce that way at such a crucial moment. One might say that it changed the world — and I do.

Watch it. Read it. Do it.

Read the whole story, including why it’s taken so long for the world to learn of this ‘righteous Gentile,’ in Mark Honigsbaum’s interview with Rabbi Frank Dabba Smith, whose painstaking amateur detective work pieced together the story, in “New life through a lens” at the Financial Times website. Frank Dabba Smith’s 2002 article “Ernst Leitz of Wetzlar and Altruism During the Holocaust,” (MS Word format) provides additional documentation for the amazing story of what I refer to as the “Leicajuden.”

Learn more about what historians have called the “Leica Freedom Train” from photographic historian George Gilbert’s article at ZeroZero.com and his 2004 presentation for the Photographic Historical Society of Canada.

(H/T to Lucianne.com)