My friend Tim Harris is the founder and director of Seattle’s award-winning street paper, Real Change, and current president of the North American Street Newspapers Association. These days, he’s also the devoted father of a pair of charming 3-year-old twin daughters. Though Tim would squirm at the idea, surely he’s become one of Seattle’s most admired and productive citizens. He’s even been fictionalized—favorably—by Sherman Alexie in the New Yorker!

But Tim has been in a self-revealing mood these past couple of weeks. In a series of memoir tales, he has surprised those of us who thought we knew him, by describing his youth as a troubled time dominated by drinking, drugs, loveless sex, truly outrageous behavior, and complete alienation from conventional mores and institutions. I have to admit: it’s a pretty fun read.

But a question remains: What transformed the youthful Tim into the one we know now? We can’t yet know because he hasn’t gotten that far in his memoir writing. But reading his stories brought to my mind a character from one of my very favorite movies, The Sorrow and the Pity, by Marcel Ophuls.

In the 1960s, Ophuls interviewed many people who had lived in the French city of Clermont-Ferrand when it was occupied by the Nazis during World War II. Those interviews make up his riveting 4-hour film. The film is full of images of people—generally from the most acceptable levels of society—uncomfortably rationalizing how they had accommodated themselves to Nazi rule. Watching, it was all too easy for me to imagine myself in their shoes and to recognize the immense difficulty of acting otherwise. I had to ask myself—as I’m sure Ophuls intended me to do—whether I would have done just as they did. Most had not been overtly bad people, and most were sympathetic characters—it’s just that they had not done anything significant to resist their occupiers. And as for me, I had to ask: Could I ever have found the courage to stand up against that frightening regime, or to act to protect Jews, dissidents, and other imperiled people around me? Could I ever have hidden someone in my attic, hearing the footsteps of storm troopers in the streets below?

The film also shows a handful of people who did find the courage to resist. There were two farmer brothers, for example, who refused to see themselves as special in any way, and explained matter-of-factly that they had joined the Resistance because “well, obviously, it was the only thing to do.”

Most memorable of all the characters—the one who still often comes to my mind—was a man who had become one of the greatest leaders of the Resistance. He was asked how he had found it in himself to do that. His explanation will gently resound in the back of my mind for the rest of my life: For the bourgeois, it would have been very difficult, probably impossible. But for him, it had been relatively easy, because he had been the town roué. Since he was already a social outcast, he had had nothing to lose by acting courageously.

We'll have to wait for Tim's story. But meanwhile, we can wonder whether he and the Resistance leader, were they to share a good vin rouge at a sidewalk table, might find some common ground.