The banality of good
My name is Alex Bronstein. I am 45 years old. I am Russian by birth, Israeli by nationality and by belonging, Sardinian by adoption, and these days I spend most of my time in Vienna. I am a scientist, an engineer, an entrepreneur and a technology investor — and this is perhaps the least obvious place I could have found myself in. I am still wondering why I accepted the invitation to speak here today.
I will try to explain why.
Try as I might, I could not connect what I do for a living to today’s subject. What I can offer you are a few personal episodes and some reflections. I have lived in different worlds, and I still live, in part, in more than one at the same time. If something useful comes out of this slightly oblique view, then my presence here will have made some sense.
As I said, I am more used to speaking in public about equations than about emotions, so forgive me if I lose control of my voice.
I was born in Russia — pardon, the Soviet Union, as it was called at the time. My first “political” memory goes back to kindergarten. I was four or five, and during the afternoon nap I would often pretend to sleep. One day I overheard the teachers talking among themselves. One was complaining about something — I don’t remember what — and said: “Only here, in the Soviet Union, do things go like this.” Shortly before, though, we children had been told the exact opposite: that only here did things really work well. It was a little epiphany. A child’s elementary logic was enough to see that something did not add up. From then on, as far back as I can remember, I have treated Soviet reality for what it was — a lie — and looked at the State as a hostile entity.
For the rest, my Soviet childhood was a serene one; my memories of it are very happy. I grew up in a non-believing family and had no awareness of being Jewish until I was perhaps eight or nine. I remember an episode: my best friend, angry that I would not give him a toy, insulted me with a Russian word — “жид,” Yid — used as a synonym for “stingy.” He probably did not even know what it meant. I repeated it to my grandmother and saw her face change. She explained what it meant, and that is when I understood I was “different.” Strangely, it neither shook nor troubled me. As a child, I never experienced antisemitism.
Nor was that childhood marked by the Shoah. I vaguely remember a grainy photograph in a book: it looked like a heap of bodies. The book spoke of a “catastrophe” — that is how the Holocaust was often called in Russian. With a child’s naivety I thought of a plane crash, and thought no more of it.
My first real encounter with the Shoah happened in Israel. In 1990 my parents took me there: I was ten. At school the subject was addressed head-on, without many filters. On Holocaust Memorial Day, in elementary school, an old lady came to tell us her story: a wrinkled face, sad eyes, a voice almost devoid of emotion. As a young Polish Jewish girl, she had been deported — to Majdanek, I believe. Torn away from the rest of her family, whom she never saw again; they had surely all perished. She told us that in that place she very quickly learned a simple and terrible rule: not being able to work was equal to death.
One day she fell while dragging a cart loaded with stones and did not have the strength to rise to her feet. A German officer slowly approached her, put the barrel of his pistol to her forehead and asked in German: “Do you want to die?” Driven to that desperate state of existence in which death seems a relief, she replied: “Yes.” And, much to her disbelief, the German did not shoot. He just ordered her to get up and continue her work.
That lady survived the war. But one detail in particular stayed with me: every night hence, in her dreams, she says “no” — and the soldier pulls the trigger. I think of that woman often; her story will probably haunt me until the end of my days. As a father, I ask myself: is it a good idea to tell such stories to little people who still trust us, grown-ups? And yet these are the last years in which we can still listen to a living memory. When there are no witnesses left, what will these memories become? Will they still speak to our grandchildren’s hearts, or will they be just dry and distant pages, like the Punic Wars? And above all: will we really manage to avoid repeating the same mistakes once direct memory has faded away?
In my family, the Shoah was rarely spoken of, and often as if it concerned “others.” Only much later did my grandfather tell me a story. I was already grown up; I remember it well. He told it as if it had happened the day before. When the Germans invaded the Soviet Union in 1941, his mother was pleading on her knees with her father — my grandfather’s grandfather — to flee at once. They lived on the border between Ukraine and Belarus. He was a stubborn, opinionated man, and he told her: “Germans? What nonsense! I remember them well — educated folks, very orderly. In 1918 they stayed for some time and paid for everything.” Poor old man, how deluded he was. He was among the first to die when the Einsatzkommandos took them to the forest. He died the way he had lived: with his head held high.
It is a detail my grandfather recalled with a kind of shame, or perhaps with painful admiration: one of the soldiers pushed — or maybe hit — that man’s wife. And that could not pass unanswered. Not even in front of a machine gun. Not even facing an imminent end. So he reacted; he stood up to defend her. A tiny, human, utterly useless gesture. And yet that gesture held everything: pride, love, the impossibility of accepting humiliation as if it were normal.
But before that, he somehow managed to smuggle a boy away, instructing him: “Now you watch carefully, and then tell those who survive what happened here.” The boy stayed alive, hiding for weeks in the forest, and then re-emerged to tell the story.
After the war, many people asked themselves what monster a person must be to be capable of such atrocities. The question also tormented a young American psychiatrist, Douglas Kelley, who at Nuremberg was charged with evaluating the top Nazi leaders to establish whether they were fit to stand trial. Kelley hoped to find a common “pathology”: a sign, a trait, something that would allow one to recognize — and perhaps even to prevent.
To his surprise, he found no decisive aberrations. He even befriended Hermann Göring. And this is perhaps one of the most unsettling things of all: those who orchestrated unspeakable atrocities were not monsters. They were normal people. Decent people. I imagine they could be faithful husbands and loving fathers. Perhaps cultured and educated — they listened to Wagner or Beethoven, read Goethe and Heine (pardon, “unknown author,” as he became in those times). They smelled the roses and fed the squirrels seeds from their bare hands. Hands perhaps stained red. No, it was not blood — just the juice of wild strawberries.
The banality of evil, as Hannah Arendt would put it later.
That realization may have driven Kelley to his eventual suicide. It has accompanied me for years, and it always brings me back to the same question: what would I do, put in similar circumstances? I like to think I would be different. But the honest — and unsettling — answer is probably that I would do what most people would do: nothing. Or very little.
There is a recurring image in Jewish memory: a child who sees, for the first time, his father humiliated and beaten in the street by an antisemitic mob. The father does not react. And the passersby keep walking, averting their eyes, pretending not to see. It is a collective trauma, recounted by many. There is a line by Hayim Nahman Bialik, in his City of Slaughter, that crystallizes it with painful precision:
הַשֶּׁמֶשׁ זָרְחָה, הַשִּׁטָּה פָּרְחָה וְהַשּׁוֹחֵט שָׁחַט
The slayer slew, the blossom burst, and it was sunny weather.
Business as usual.
As a child, I did not live through that humiliation. I was spared it, fortunately. But I had my own “moment,” as an adult, here in Italy. A little over a year ago I came here, to Cagliari, to teach a university course — advanced statistical methods for artificial intelligence. On arrival I found a poster calling for a boycott of the “Zionist professor,” urging to “mobilize against the Zionism that creeps through our classrooms,” and other words and tones that would not have looked out of place in a 1938 issue of Der Stürmer. The poster came with a protest organized to stop the course from taking place. The Digos — the Italian political police — even had to give me an escort.
I do not think I have the eloquence needed to describe what one feels when, because of one’s identity and nationality, someone decides to tell you: “you are not welcome.” I married a Sardinian half a lifetime ago, binding my fate to this land. I have been living in Sardinia — if not full time — for more years than many of my protesters have been alive. I speak Italian with my children. I am also a citizen of this Republic, and this is my home. I am at home. And yet, in that moment, I felt almost tangibly how a society can reduce a person to a label, and with what unsettling speed delegitimization can become an acceptable language.
What struck me most was the silence of the University: the absence of a clear, simple word, of a stance taken in defense of a principle. I do not need to be defended personally — I can take care of myself quite well — but what must be protected is the very idea of the university as a place of debate and intellectual freedom. It seems to me that lately we have completely lost the culture of dialogue and of civilized political dissent.
A year later, the academic senate of the same university passed a motion to sever collaborations with Israeli institutions and with individual Israeli researchers, in response to the actions of the Israeli government. I will not enter into the politics. I have plenty to say, of course. But not today. Not here. I will say only this: science, in its essence, transcends ideological, religious and national borders. It is one of the most universal enterprises we have. I count myself fortunate to be part of it, and I am proud of it, because I believe it should serve as an example to society as a whole. When an academic institution adopts criteria of exclusion based on belonging or on a label, it commits an anti-academic act. Today it strikes some; tomorrow it can strike anyone. And above all, it normalizes a method. This war, I hope, will end. But the shame of certain gestures remains, and there is no erasing it.
I am probably the person furthest from politics you could imagine. But this episode made me realize, with blinding clarity, that if we do not want to repeat our ancestors’ mistakes, we must do something different from what they did in similar circumstances. That is why I am here today. Because I feel it is my duty to raise my voice where they chose to step back. Because I do not intend to keep silent, and I will certainly not be intimidated by a few insults from a noisy little group.
Not because I consider myself particularly brave. But because I have learned that silence — the silence of the passersby who avert their eyes — is one of history’s most reliable gears. It is precisely that failure to act that enables the most odious crimes against humanity. And here English comes to our aid. We call them bystanders. But “to stand by” means two opposite things: to stand by and watch, or to stand by someone11. In the original Italian speech, the verb was assistere which has a similar double meaning: “to assist” and “to witness”. I chose the English “to stand by” in the translation as a very close approximation.. The word itself holds the choice, and the choice is ours. When we stand by an injustice and pretend not to see, we are not decorations on the stage. We are, in fact, actors. And therefore accomplices.
There is another thing that is part of me, and it concerns Israel. Growing up in Israel was a turning point in my life. It certainly gave me an edge. Many describe that country as a miracle: an improbable twentieth-century project that, against all odds, worked. At an immense price, never to be forgotten. But that price, and the strength that followed, bring with them an even greater responsibility.
Because “never again” is not a museum slogan: it is a living principle. And today it applies to those who hold power, too. Jews today have a State, an army, the capacity to defend themselves. We have a nuclear arsenal — at least so the others say. Not to make another Hiroshima, but never to allow anyone another Auschwitz. Yet everything our people has suffered does not automatically make us immune to repeating mistakes against others. There are no congenital antibodies: we must want them, build them, defend them.
I am Israeli, and so far history has, unfortunately, destined us to be a nation of warriors. I have always believed that no enemy would be beyond our capabilities. But it dismays me to think that Israel’s greatest enemy today is Israel itself: its growing internal divisions and its worrying temptation toward moral erosion and loss of measure. Recent events show that Israel can defend itself against anyone. But if we want our children to grow up in that country, we must also make sure that what remains of it in the end is still worth defending.
Finally, I would like to tell you one last episode from my family — tied not to Nazism but to another regime, every bit as monstrous. My paternal grandmother, born in 1933, became part of the collateral damage of Soviet terror — one of the many, the countless. One night NKVD agents knocked on the door, shot the dog, and took away her mother. “Ten years without the right of correspondence,” the formula said. It was a euphemism — one of the many lies. It meant that she had been shot, in some anonymous dark basement.
The four-year-old girl was adopted by a colleague of her parents, a woman who would become my great-grandmother Anna. Fortunately, we cannot even imagine it today, but in those years adopting the daughter of two “enemies of the people” was an act of almost unbelievable courage. We all learned that she was not our biological grandmother only after she passed away, in 1987. Not even my father knew. That secret had been kept for decades, out of fear and perhaps out of modesty. Even long after, my grandmother was reluctant to talk about her past.
In those days, my grandmother’s father — a microbiologist — was fighting epidemics. He witnessed how the Red Army “stopped” an outbreak: it surrounded a village, locked everyone in their homes, and burned everything. He was an uncomfortable witness. He knew that sooner or later the knock on the door in the middle of the night would come for him, too. So he took his own life in a way that could pass as an accident, hoping to spare his wife and daughter. He administered himself anthrax spores with a chilling, cold-blooded determination. But it did not work as he had hoped. Nothing remains of those two lives besides a pair of old passport photographs.
I say this because it always strikes me when someone treats that monstrous totalitarianism with ideological levity, granting it perhaps some indulgence. Here in Italy we are too often guilty of it. Real suffering does not lend itself to “cute” symbols. And memory, if it is good for anything, is good for this too: not bending reality to our flags, not forcing it into comfortable frames.
And here, if you will allow me one last personal note: I bear the surname of an ancestor of mine named Lev Davidovich Bronstein — better known to history as Leon Trotsky. Sometimes I catch myself wishing I could look him in the eye and ask whether he, too, believed he was “on the right side of history” while he was engineering, together with his accomplices, the machinery that would devour tens of millions of people.
But I do not want to conclude by returning to the banality of evil. So many pages have already been written about it, and at times they make one lose hope. I have always believed that shadows exist to remind us of the existence of light. I would rather conclude by speaking about the banality of good. And there is no better place for it than this one: the Garden of the Righteous. Each tree here has a name — the name of an ordinary person, like me or like you: not professional heroes, not even saints. People who, in inhuman circumstances, chose to remain human. A bit like great-grandmother Anna.
I knew her only when she was already lost in the darkness of her senile mind. I was mindlessly cruel to her, as only little children can be. Today I feel nothing but profound admiration for that woman. I have a photograph of her that is especially dear to me: standing behind her microscope, dressed in white, with a steady gaze. A gaze that, I imagine, holds the selfsame determination, the selfsame will she had when she decided to take an orphaned child into her home. I don’t know if you are aware of it, but in Russian — and in Ukrainian too — the word воля, “will,” also means “freedom.” It seems to me a perfect symbol to end with.
Thank you for your attention.