Every once in a while I pass a car with a bumper sticker urging me to practice “random acts of kindness.” It sounds like a warm, fuzzy way to make the world nicer. But if you look at the story of Dutch-Paris, you’ll see that random acts of kindness can have profound consequences.

For example, in late 1943 a Dutch-Paris courier was on his way to a rendezvous at an apartment building in Brussels. He knocked on the wrong door. The lady who answered the door told him that the Gestapo was in the apartment he was looking for. It goes without saying that he left the building immediately. He was free to play an instrumental role in linking up the line and escorting hundreds of people to safety.

That neighbor lady did not have to answer her door at all. She put herself at risk by warning the stranger about the Gestapo. No one would put it past them to arrest her for doing that. In that situation, her act was not only kind but courageous.

Here’s another example that I’ve mentioned before. In December 1943 an Engelandvaarder was arrested in Paris by Wehrmacht officers. He opened the back door of their vehicle, rolled out and ran off through the blacked out streets of Paris. At one point, after the alarm had been sounded and the police were in pursuit, an old lady took the young man by the arm and told him to escort her to the Metro. The police paid him no attention because he was escorting an old woman. Her kindness, and her courage, certainly saved him.

The complete story of Dutch-Paris has to be full of such spontaneous acts of kindness. Not all of them would have been so courageous. Just giving food to a fugitive would have made a big difference to people on the run. Looking the other way, making a gesture to indicate that police were ahead, giving a foreigner directions, all those things would have made a difference to fugitives and the resisters helping them. It’s impossible to even begin to count the random acts of kindness that supported Dutch-Paris. Only the most dramatic, like the lady taking the Engelandvaarder’s arm on the streets of Paris, made it into the archives. Others may have been remembered only in the family stories of the beneficiaries. Others may not even have been noticed by anyone but the person who did them. But there is no doubt whatsoever that random acts of kindness played an important role in the resistance to the Nazis.