
Riley Allen
Odyssey of the Children
In 1919, Riley Allen and his fellow Red Cross volunteers rescued 800 young summer campers from Petrograd, Russia, after they were cut off from home by the Bolshevik Revolution. Allen saw the children reunited with their families following a two-year around-the-world odyssey. The little-known mission was one of the most selfless acts of humanitarianism ever. “Those lost children were someone else’s,” a relative of one of the children said years later. “The Americans didn’t have to do anything, but they did.” (Photo: Library of Congress)