Years ago, I read about a documentary filmmaker whose interest is in the Holocaust, in particular stories about grassroots resistance, about Jews who risked their lives and freedom to help others escape, and about European gentiles who secretly harboured Jews in their homes during Nazi occupation.

It was altruism, the filmmaker explained, not evil that fascinated him. As Hannah Arendt so powerfully explained, the roots of evil — self-pity, fear, self-interest, greed, ignorance, boredom — are so often banal.

Altruism is the real mystery, because it seems so contrary to human nature and to human history.

Why did some people act unselfishly and put themselves in great danger to help others who were often strangers to them? What drove some to act with such bravery and great compassion when so many others had turned blind eyes to the atrocities being committed around them? What made them different?

Were they more courageous, or did they have a greater conscience? Those were the questions the filmmaker sought to explore in his work.

I’ve thought of these questions often since, and never as much as right now, watching the religious fighting in India, the civil strife in Colombia, the bloody diamond wars in Angola, Sierra Leone and the Democratic Republic of Congo, the human rights violations in Zimbabwe, the dismal cycle of terror and retaliation in the U.S. and the Middle East, and the recent series of murders of children by their parents in North America.

Peace, like war, is not always the answer. Some extraordinarily ruthless acts and some extraordinarily ruthless perpetrators necessitate severe and forceful responses.

Yet a look at our own collective human histories indicates that unjust violence far outweighs the just, and that our inclination is more often cruel and callous than kind and wise. That’s why I’m also fascinated by those people who act against injustice and intolerance at great risk to themselves, and especially by those people who respond to their own suffering and loss, not with hatred or revenge, but with compassion.

I’m thinking of a small group of Americans, families of the some of the victims of the September 11 attacks, who visited people in Afghanistan who had lost relatives of their own in American attacks.

While their nation was being whipped into war frenzy, these people chose to find connection with the very people their president said were the enemy. One American woman, whose brother was killed on September 11, said of the Afghan family who took her in, fed her, and wept with her, “They are my brothers and sisters now.”

Then there’s Matan Kaminer, a young Israeli refusenik, whom I wrote about last week. Despite the anti-Semitism he’s experienced and witnessed, despite the fear and rage he feels each time a Palestinian bomb goes off in a pizzeria, or on a bus, he’s chosen not to serve in the Israeli army. Instead, he works to foster a peaceful co-existence between Jews and Arabs.

There’s Dennis Shepard, the father of Matthew Shepard, a young man who was beaten and killed in Wyoming in 1998 by two other men because he was gay. At the trial of one of his son’s murderers, Dennis Shepard helped commute the sentence from the death penalty to life imprisonment, telling the court, “This is the time to begin the healing process. To show mercy to someone who refused to show any mercy.”

There are the moderate Hindus in Gujarat, who are sheltering Muslims in their homes and refusing to participate in the religious clashes that were sparked when a train carrying Hindu activists was attacked by Muslims. Hundreds of Muslims have been killed in retaliation in Hindu attacks on mosques, shrines, tombs and homes.

The list could go on and on; in a world with no shortage of suffering, there are endless surprising acts of righteousness and of peace.

On the surface, these people have little in common. They come from different cultures, races, classes and religions and their acts of compassion vary greatly in scope and form. The reasons for their actions vary greatly, too — some are driven by faith, others by politics, still others by personal convictions and affections.

What they have in common, I believe, is a deep faith in the common human experience and a deep commitment to seeing beyond difference to what each of us share.

When they look at other people, they don’t see “other,” but instead, they see themselves.