Jersey (not Jozefow), 2010 (not 1942)
When asked why he did it, the boy averts his eyes, fidgets. He does not lie, but he cannot face the truth. His lip trembles and he shakes when shown the photos. When asked to describe his role, he employs the passive voice and talks about others: I was told… They insisted…When pressed for an explanation, he refers to a chain of command: I did what they said. He talks about the older boys, the way he wanted to belong, the way he went along. When asked if he pulled the trigger, he nods and shrugs. And when forced to talk about what really happened in the woods, he cries at the memory — the shallow grave, the waste of life. He did not want to shoot the dog, you can tell. There is no hate in his eyes, no fanatical glint. He is not accustomed to such cruelty.
He is an ordinary boy.
Peer pressure is such a heavy load. That is so what boys are.
Yes, but not just boys. This is not intended to be a gender-based commentary; we all have it in us. The title is perhaps misleading in that regard, but this is
as much an homage to Christopher Browning’s remarkable book Ordinary Men as anything else. I read Browning’s book years ago; it is one of the best accounts of how ordinary people engage in cruel acts that I know. Browning addresses the Nazi invasion of Poland, but let’s not fool ourselves into believing that members of the Einsatzgruppen were all raving lunatics or extraordinary monsters: cruelty is part of the human condition.
I agree, we all have that ability to say “It’s not my fault,” and “I didn’t do it”.
We also have the ability to be drawn along with the crowd, to do things that by ourselves we’d be appalled at. It is so hard to stand up and be counted, we often think ‘what if they turn on me next’ or ‘what can my lone voice do?’
This was chilling in its matter-of-fact delivery. Well done.
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