We’ve been discussing the essential qualities of a resistance leader, including being a good judge of character, having social skills, and being decisive, flexible and steady. Perhaps the most essential of all, however, the quality that would get a man or a woman into the predicament of leading a resistance group in the first place, is imagination.

Perhaps I should qualify that as compassionate imagination. Lots of people were able to imagine the consequences of Nazi rule, the dissolution of personal liberties, the terror. But very few people became resistance leaders. Seeing what’s happening around you and imagining how it could get worse is one thing. Imagining a way out of it is another. And imagining that risking your life in order to publish a clandestine newspaper or rescue strangers would be a way to free everyone from Nazism takes another level of imagination altogether.

Resisters who helped fugitives, like the men and women of Dutch-Paris, needed a compassionate imagination to sympathize with the fugitives enough to take the risks to help them.

Once committed to helping the persecuted, it took imagination to think up a way to hide and feed them or to move them across borders and countries to freedom. Nothing about that was easy and all of it was illegal. The helpers in Dutch-Paris used their imaginations and creativity to find safe routes, to recruit other helpers and to raise and transfer money. In fact, the middle aged men who mostly took care of the money might have been some of the most creative members of the network.

So the leaders relied on their imaginations first off to inspire them. They had to imagine the predicament of the persecuted people they helped, which took compassion as well. Then they had to imagine the illegal ways out of that situation. An unimaginative person might have felt bad when they saw strangers in dire straits, but they would not thought they could help or figured out how.