People who stand up when it counts are very rare

When Michael Moritz was a small boy, he stayed in a small house in rural Bavaria that a childless couple had constructed themselves. The woman who lived there, Anna, had once looked after his father as a nanny. To the boy, the house felt crowded with ghosts from the Nazi past.

In the 1920s and early 1930s, Anna worked in his grandfather's household in Munich, caring for Moritz's father and his brother when they were children. She was Roman Catholic. After she left that work, she married a railway worker who was also Catholic, and the two built a life together in the countryside.

Anna's choice is what the story is about, and why Moritz still measures people against it. Moritz, who grew up in Wales as the child of Jewish refugees from Germany and later spent decades as an investor at Sequoia, the Silicon Valley firm known for backing Apple, Google, and many others, says Anna belonged among those honored by Yad Vashem, Israel's Holocaust memorial, with the title Righteous Among the Nations, given to non-Jews who risked themselves to help Jews.

Even after she no longer worked for the family, Anna and her husband kept that friendship when keeping it turned difficult. When it became unpopular to welcome Jews in the Bavarian countryside, they continued to invite Moritz's grandparents, father, and uncle for holidays for as long as they could. Moritz said she "had this ethical compass that she wouldn't allow anyone else to alter." After the war, his father and uncle returned to Bavaria to see her, and they remained close until she died.

That standard stayed with him. During the pandemic, while joining long video calls that showed ten small faces on a screen, Moritz silently sorted people he knew well into three groups drawn from Un Village Francais, known in English as The Village, a French drama about life in a village under German occupation in World War II. By resisters, he meant the few who actively opposed the occupation, alongside those who stayed quiet and those who cooperated with the Germans.

He asked himself who had Anna's backbone. He concluded that such people were always in the minority. Moritz said, "Bad things happen in countries when most people stay silent." Asked if most of the founders he had backed would have been among the resisters, he answered, "I'd like to think so, but I'm not sure."