Arctic explorer Peter Freuchen with his first wife Navarana Mequpaluk ca. 1912. Freuchen was once trapped in ice for 30 hours and escaped by making a chisel out of his own frozen feces. Not only that, he then amputated his frostbitten toes with pincers and a hammer
via reddit
He also was a writer, humanitarian, and campaigned for Inuit rights and awareness. When his first wife died, the Christian mission in Thule, Greenland, refused to bury her in the church graveyard because she wasn’t baptized. So freuchen grabbed a shovel and buried her himself on a hill overlooking the town.
When World War Two rolled around, Freuchen’s homeland of Denmark was invaded by the Germans. Freuchen joined the Danish Resistance and spent a good amount of time afterward just walking the streets and keeping an eye out for any Jews being harassed. If he saw any, he would stride up to the conflict and LOOM over the antagonizers (he was like seven feet tall) and say:
“I’m a jew too. What are you going to do about it?”
He was thrown in prison, walked out, and escaped to Sweden. And he did all of that with a peg-leg.
After the war he married his third wife, Dagmar, a Danish-Jewish designer and writer who became his partner in publication and writing.
He later went on to serve as a fact-checker for Hollywood movies set in the arctic as well as the winner of The $64,000 Question game show.
This guy was the exemplar of humanity in every way possible.
