While text books may herald Mother Teresa and T.V. may praise Bono, there are people who’ve changed the world and average Joes who found themselves in extraordinary situations who are heroes you’ve never heard of.

5. Irena Sendler

Irena Sendler was a social worker in Warsaw and member of Polish underground organization, Zegota. After recruiting a number of her friends to put themselves in harm’s way, Sendler smuggled many children to orphanages and homes and got them non-Jewish aliases. Sendler recorded their true names on thin rolls of paper, the placed the scrolls into jars and buried them in the hope that she could reunite them with their families later.

In 1943, she was captured by the Nazis and tortured but refused to tell her captors who her co-conspirators were or where the jars were buried. After having her legs and feet broken by her captors, a Gestapo officer who had been bribed by the resistance helped her escape.

After the war, Sendler unearthed the jars and began trying to return the children to their families. For the vast majority, there was no family left. Many of the children were adopted by Polish families; others were sent to Israel. In total, it is estimated that Sendler saved the lives of nearly 3,000 people.
(Source: LA Times)

4. Jeff May

In 2005, Jeff Weise walked into Red Lake Senior High in northern Minnesota carrying three guns. He opened fire, killing eight people and wounding seven more. When sophomore Jeff May saw what was going on, he didn’t run for cover or hide.

Armed only with the pencil he’d used for algebra, May went straight at Weise and tried to stop him. May ran at the gunman and jabbed him hard in the side. The two struggled and May was shot in the face. Then the police showed up, exchanging gunfire with Weise, who then killed himself.
(Source Reader’s Digest)

EDIT: We should have pointed out that Jeff is still alive. He’s apparently made of that metal that terminators are made out of, and even a shot to the face at point-blank range can’t stop him.

3. Liviu Librescu

Born in Romania in 1930, Librescu was interned as a boy in a labor camp in Transnistria when Romania allied with Nazi Germany. In the 70′s, Librescu’s refused to swear allegiance to the Romanian Communist Party and was forced out of academia for his sympathies towards Israel. In 1978, after years of attempting to gain government permission to emigrate to Israel, Librescu was finally able to leave Romania when Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin personally intervened to get the Librescu family an emigration permit by directly asking Romanian President Nicolae Ceausescu to let them go.

Librescu was 76 years old and teaching a solid mechanics class at Virgina Tech in April of 2007, when Seung-Hui Cho killed 32 people and wounded many others before committing suicide in the deadliest shooting rampage by a single gunman in U.S. history. Librescu held the door of his classroom shut when Cho attempted to enter it. So Cho fired through the door, striking Librescu five times, ending his life. After that, Cho was able to get into the room, but thanks to Librescu, nearly all of his students had escaped through a window by then. Of the 23 registered students in his class, one one, Minal Panchal, died.
(Sources: Wikipedia & The Independent [Ireladnd])

2. Dietrich Bonhoeffer

Dietrich Bonhoeffer was a 20th century Christian theologian in Germany who wrote a number of books, including The Cost of Discipleship. In the 1930′s, Bonhoeffer was a founding member of the Nazi-resistance movement, the confessing church, where he and others risked their lives to hide Jews and sneak them out of the country. Bonhoeffer was also part of a secret resistance group of high-ranking military officers based in the Abwehr (Military Intelligence) that were intent on overthrowing the Nazi party by assassinating Adolph Hitler.

In 1942, Bonhoeffer and his co-conspirators managed to get a bomb onto Hitler’s plane undetected. Hitler got on his plane, completely unaware of the explosive. Unfortunately, the bomb failed to detonate. In 1943, Bonhoeffer was imprisoned for conspiracy after money that was used to help Jews escape to Switzerland was tied to him.

After Count Claus von Stauffenberg detonated a bomb under a desk just a few feet from Adolph Hitler in July of 1944 (which served as the inspiration for the upcoming film Valkyrie directed by Bryan Singer and starring Tom Cruise), the Nazis discovered Bonhoeffer’s ties to the conspirators and had him tortured and killed.
(Sources: Bonhoeffer [documentary] & Wikipedia)

1. Norman Borlaug

Norman Borlaug has been called “the greatest human being alive” and is one of only five people in history to have won the Nobel Peace Prize, the Presidential Medal of Freedom, and the Congressional Gold Medal.

Having received a Ph.D. in Plant Pathology in 1942, Borlaug has spent his entire life using his gifts to save lives. He pioneered the introduction of high-yield crops and weather-resistant crops into 3rd-world countries, where they otherwise would have only been able to grow a fraction the amount of food that they accomplished with his help.

Borlaug not only pioneered the technology, but spent years traveling the globe and helping countries implement it. In just five years, between 1965 and 1970, Borlaug was able to help Pakistan and India nearly double their wheat yields. He helped Mexico grow enough wheat that by 1963, they had so much they could export. More recently, he’s helped a number of countries in Africa not only plant high-yield crops, but also put weather-resistant crops of wheat where wheat couldn’t grow before due to hot and arid conditions.

While “wheat crop-yeilds” might seem mundane and make for a odd choice of hero, the reason he tops our list is simple: Norman Borlaug has single-handedly saved over one billion lives. According to the United Nations, more than 30,000 people die every day from preventable, poverty-related causes (one of the major causes being lack of food). Because of technology Norman Borlaug both invented and helped implement throughout the globe, more than a billion of the roughly seven billion people alive today owe their lives to Norman Borlaug.
(Sources: Penn & Teller: BS! & Wikipedia)