Yesterday Tablet Magazine posted an article posted an article about an event in Margaret Thatcher’s childhood that made a lasting impression on her.

The article reports:

Johnson (Charles Johnson) starts with what Thatcher often said was her greatest accomplishment, which was not her work in helping to topple the Soviet Union or being the first British woman to hold the post of prime minister, but rather, was her work as a child to save a Jewish teenager in Austria from the grasp of Hitler’s terror.

The story begins in 1938 when Edith Muhlbauer, a 17-year-old Jewish girl, wrote a letter to Muriel Roberts, Edith’s pen pal and the future prime minister’s [Margaret Thatcher] older sister. The letter expressed fear that as Hitler began rounding up Jews in Austria that her family would be included in those round-ups. The Roberts family did not have the means to take Edith in, and Margaret, then 12, and Muriel, 17, set about raising funds and persuading the local Rotary club to help. Edith stayed with a number of Rotary families for about two years until she was able to go to South America to join relatives.

The article reports:

Had the Roberts family not intervened, Edith recalled years later, “I would have stayed in Vienna and they would have killed me.” Thatcher never forgot the lesson: “Never hesitate to do whatever you can, for you may save a life,” she told audiences in 1995 after Edith had been located, alive and well, in Brazil.

Prime Minister Thatcher showed courage and determination even as a young adult. It is no wonder that she grew up to be the “Iron Lady.”