13
“Am I watching or witnessing? Am I complicit or courageous?”
During my time as a FASPE Fellow, I found myself asking several questions I never thought I’d wrestle with so deeply. Questions sat with me, followed me, and disturbed me as I observed the documented atrocities on the trip. One of those questions was: am I watching, or am I witnessing?
We traveled through Germany and Poland, walking in places where history still breathes, in conference rooms where people designed and communicated evil, in corporate buildings where they bartered ethics, and in Auschwitz-Birkenau, where humanity itself seemed to collapse. That journey did not just leave me with knowledge. It left me with questions.
Uncomfortable, probing questions that still sit with me.
Since then, I have come to the realization that watching is passive, standing by while life happens. Witnessing, on the other hand, carries weight. To witness is to be implicated, to acknowledge, to take responsibility for what my eyes have seen undeterred by possible ramifications.
And then there is the harder question: am I complicit, or am I courageous? In our FASPE sessions, we explored how ordinary professionals such as lawyers, doctors, and business leaders rationalized their complicity during the Nazi era. They did their jobs, claimed moral neutrality, and let ambition guide them down a slippery slope. Visiting Auschwitz-Birkenau made that history real: I walked through rooms of shoes, glasses, prayer shawls, prosthetic legs—everyday items stripped from people before their lives were taken. I thought not only about the victims but also about the bystanders. The guards. The sympathizers. The ones who knew and said nothing. Were they watching? Or were they witnessing, choosing complicity? What would I have done?
But then I remember the story of the little Polish girl who buried apples for the prisoners to find. She was not powerful, not armed, not in control of the system. But she witnessed. She was courageous. Her actions did not topple the Nazi regime, but they said, “I refuse to let my humanity fade away.” There are a few other stories of minor dissidents here and there. The Roman Catholic bishop of Munster, Clemens August Graf von Galen, who brought the world’s attention to the T4 Program, remains one of the most poignant examples I can think of.
Those stories stay with me because they reframe the “Bystander Effect.” They lead me to ask myself:
●
●
●
Am I any different from those who chose silence then, or am I capable of the same fading today?
Short answer? I am not made of better clay. And that realization is not self-accusation; it is the humility that keeps me awake.
History is direct here. Ordinary people—clerks, nurses, salesmen—slid into participating in atrocities not because they were born monsters but because they obeyed, conformed, and rationalized. Hannah Arendt called this the banality of evil: evil made ordinary by thoughtlessness and careerism rather than cartoonish villainy.1 Christopher Browning’s Ordinary Men shows a police unit of middle-aged reservists who, step by step, become mass murderers. Very few refused.2
Stanley Milgram’s obedience experiments show how far people go when an authority calmly insists that they “continue.” Most did. They felt uneasy; they still complied.3 That is the part that haunts me. Feeling wrong does not automatically produce doing right. And, in emergencies, John Darley and Bibb Latané found that the more bystanders that are present, the less any individual person acts; diffusion of responsibility dulls agency.4 That is a trap I can fall into without noticing.
“Am I watching or witnessing? Am I complicit or courageous?”
During my time as a FASPE Fellow, I found myself asking several questions I never thought I’d wrestle with so deeply. Questions sat with me, followed me, and disturbed me as I observed the documented atrocities on the trip. One of those questions was: am I watching, or am I witnessing?
We traveled through Germany and Poland, walking in places where history still breathes, in conference rooms where people designed and communicated evil, in corporate buildings where they bartered ethics, and in Auschwitz-Birkenau, where humanity itself seemed to collapse. That journey did not just leave me with knowledge. It left me with questions.
Uncomfortable, probing questions that still sit with me.
Since then, I have come to the realization that watching is passive, standing by while life happens. Witnessing, on the other hand, carries weight. To witness is to be implicated, to acknowledge, to take responsibility for what my eyes have seen undeterred by possible ramifications.
And then there is the harder question: am I complicit, or am I courageous? In our FASPE sessions, we explored how ordinary professionals such as lawyers, doctors, and business leaders rationalized their complicity during the Nazi era. They did their jobs, claimed moral neutrality, and let ambition guide them down a slippery slope. Visiting Auschwitz-Birkenau made that history real: I walked through rooms of shoes, glasses, prayer shawls, prosthetic legs—everyday items stripped from people before their lives were taken. I thought not only about the victims but also about the bystanders. The guards. The sympathizers. The ones who knew and said nothing. Were they watching? Or were they witnessing, choosing complicity? What would I have done?
But then I remember the story of the little Polish girl who buried apples for the prisoners to find. She was not powerful, not armed, not in control of the system. But she witnessed. She was courageous. Her actions did not topple the Nazi regime, but they said, “I refuse to let my humanity fade away.” There are a few other stories of minor dissidents here and there. The Roman Catholic bishop of Munster, Clemens August Graf von Galen, who brought the world’s attention to the T4 Program, remains one of the most poignant examples I can think of.
Those stories stay with me because they reframe the “Bystander Effect.” They lead me to ask myself:
●
●
●
Am I any different from those who chose silence then, or am I capable of the same fading today?
Short answer? I am not made of better clay. And that realization is not self-accusation; it is the humility that keeps me awake.
History is direct here. Ordinary people—clerks, nurses, salesmen—slid into participating in atrocities not because they were born monsters but because they obeyed, conformed, and rationalized. Hannah Arendt called this the banality of evil: evil made ordinary by thoughtlessness and careerism rather than cartoonish villainy.1 Christopher Browning’s Ordinary Men shows a police unit of middle-aged reservists who, step by step, become mass murderers. Very few refused.2
Stanley Milgram’s obedience experiments show how far people go when an authority calmly insists that they “continue.” Most did. They felt uneasy; they still complied.3 That is the part that haunts me. Feeling wrong does not automatically produce doing right. And, in emergencies, John Darley and Bibb Latané found that the more bystanders that are present, the less any individual person acts; diffusion of responsibility dulls agency.4 That is a trap I can fall into without noticing.