Angel of Mercy

What did Marla Ruzicka achieve? A great deal, but never quite enough to satisfy her. She worked with different organizations and eventually founded her own: The Campaign for Innocent Victims in Conflict (CIVIC), www.civicworldwide.org, staffed mainly by volunteers. Over the last couple of days, glowing obituaries and tributes to Marla have been published on both sides of the Atlantic, and in the war zones themselves. (Even the New York Daily News, which might once have seen Marla as an unregenerate leftist, called her "an all-American angel of mercy.") But whether CIVIC can go on without her, and who actually will help those individuals and families she helped, is an open question.

As flighty as Marla sometimes seemed, and as complicated as she actually was, she drove home one simple and powerful point she never let any of us forget--a terrible, plain truth that too many politicians, soldiers and journalists tend to ignore when they dare to talk about the dead and wounded in war as statistics for history books. "Each number," she'd say, "is a story of someone who left a family behind."

As Marla Ruzicka has done. Marla, who was one of a kind.

© 2005