Leon Rubinstein was a German soldier in World War I who fought valiantly in the brutal trench warfare that characterized the Western Front. For his bravery he earned the Iron Cross, the equivalent of the U.S. Medal of Honor.

Rubinstein later married, and with his wife, Fania, had three boys. However, because of their Jewish faith, by 1939 Rubinstein’s status as a war hero was meaningless to those who had wrested away control of his country.

Late one night he, his wife and their three very young boys were forced to flee their home with only the clothes on their backs, just ahead of SS officers who were hunting down the Rubinsteins to take the family to a concentration camp.

Rubinstein wore his old German army uniform that night, and pinned to it his Iron Cross. It afforded the family a spot on one of the last trains allowed across the Dutch border before war broke out. The family had no documentation, but young soldiers at the checkpoints saw the medal, ignored the family’s lack of official papers and allowed the Rubinsteins through.

Years later I had the incredible good fortune to live for three years in the upstairs apartment of the Rubinstein home in a Boston suburb. I was attending graduate school a long, long way from the Walla Walla farm where I had grown up and living the life of a graduate student on $400 a month in a big, East Coast city.

Each Sunday night the Rubinsteins brought up matzah ball dinners so my wife and I would not have to interrupt our studies to cook, and whenever I had a cold they fed me chicken soup. They were our family and proved to be among the very finest human beings I have ever known. My time with them taught me tolerance and understanding through the Rubinsteins’ own kindness and assistance.

I experience that same kindness and assistance and see that same tolerance and understanding each time I am in North Idaho. Although the national media would portray our community as some bastion of hate, the facts prove exactly the opposite.

For nearly 30 years, the people and communities of North Idaho have stood firm against those who wanted to create a haven for unacceptable views. While many communities would have simply condemned those extremists, the people of North Idaho went to work, fought with everything they had and never let up.

Starting in 1981, the Kootenai County Task Force on Human Relations has brought together people from all backgrounds, professions and political parties, people who represent local organizations, tribal nations, community groups, students and area leaders, to combat bigotry and prejudice. The late Rev. Bill Wassmuth, professor Tony Stewart and so many others helped weave a legacy that is the true North Idaho: tolerance of all people, but a firm stance and a commitment to fight hate.

The task force has educated 30,000 third-graders in its human rights education program over the last 24 years, according to Stewart. The task force helped spawn, in 1998, the Human Rights Education Institute, which has served as the educational arm of the organization. The program teaches the ideals espoused by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and has become a model for the rest of public schools in Washington and Idaho to follow. It continually builds on the understanding that those who do not learn and remember the mistakes of our history are doomed to repeat.

However, we must do more than just observe and remember. We must be active and vigilant. Let’s be clear: It is not intolerant to vigorously condemn purveyors of hate, be it for religious, racial, ethnic or other societal reasons. Failure to do so grants power to such people, and it can easily lead to a community or a nation betraying fundamental values, as was evidenced by the Holocaust, by ethnic cleansing in Bosnia, by the atrocities in Rwanda and by the current genocide in Darfur.

People in North Idaho stood up to hate. They fought it. They stared down the worst of humanity and forced it to back down, over and over again in ways and with a consistency shown by few other U.S. communities. And I am proud to carry that message every day so that our nation’s citizens, like the children and grandchildren of my old friends the Rubinsteins, know that Idaho’s true beauty lies in its people.