Three days after Nazi Germany invaded Poland and started World War II, Einsatzgruppe and SS divisions took control of Sosnowiec. It was September 4, 1939. They arrested my great-grandfather and tortured him. They also arrested my grandfather, who had to dig graves for murdered Jews at gunpoint. My grandfather survived the war - and I am here - because he escaped imprisonment in Sosnowiec and fled east.
The war that came to Sosnowiec was unfathomable and yet somehow also predictable. It was, above all else, intimate. Soccer fields became burial grounds; neighbors informants; friends enemies.
I study the violent dimension of “contentious politics,” a term coined by the late Charles Tilly to include social movements, protests, civil wars, revolutions, and insurgencies. Tilly’s research on contentious politics, and work that has emerged since, urges us to think beyond the individual and account for the social dynamics involved in extraordinary moments of collective action. People do not take actions on their own. They consider what their friends are doing, what their community sanctions, or what their ‘in-group’ demands of them. Choices that seem evil in retrospect at the time feel normal, rational, and are often encouraged.
“The trouble with Eichmann was precisely that so many were like him, and that the many were neither perverted nor sadistic, that they were, and still are, terribly and terrifyingly normal. From the viewpoint of our legal institutions and of our moral standards of judgment, this normality was much more terrifying than all the atrocities put together.”
-Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on
the Banality of Evil, 1963