Eighty-seven-year-old Ervin Staub owes his long life in part to two courageous individuals who helped him and thousands of other Hungarian Jews survive the “Final Solution,” Nazi Germany’s plan during World War II to systematically murder the Jewish people of Europe.
In 1944, at the age of 6, Staub recalls moving into one of 32 buildings in Budapest, Hungary, protected by the Swede Raoul Wallenberg, a descendant of a prominent Swedish banking family. With very little food available, his family’s Christian nanny, Maria Gogan, would risk her life to transport dough in a baby carriage to a local bakery, and then smuggle the bread back to the families in hiding.
Staub became a survivor, but about a half-million other Jews in Hungary at the time were murdered in death camps like Auschwitz.
The kindness and sacrifice of people like Gogan and Wallenberg inspired Staub’s life of research into root causes of humanity’s greatest acts of kindness and most horrific atrocities.
“I had a real need to try to improve the world,” Staub said. “Not just to understand it, not just to write about it, but to create changes in the world.”
Over the course of his career, the professor emeritus of psychology at the University of Massachusetts Amherst has written his life story dozens of times in research papers and 10 books. Now 87, Staub is once again revisiting his work, but this time in honor of those who made his life possible. His memoir “Evil, Goodness and Creating Active Bystandership,” reflects on the importance of courageous action in deterring violence and achieving peace not only in the past but in today’s polarizing political landscape.
“Passive bystanders, by their passivity, they enforce, reinforce the perpetrators,” Staub said. “So having people become active bystanders, who take action when others are harmed and when there is a need to help people is crucial.”
Finding active bystandership
While Staub’s early life was shaped by fear of the pro-Nazi regime in Hungary, he also lived under communist oppression until he fled Hungary at the age of 18. Staub eventually immigrated to the United States from Vienna. He enrolled at Stanford University, where he learned about other researchers studying Holocaust “rescuers” like Gogan.
In one of his papers from 2019, Staub also credits his research to the “bystander effect,” a phenomenon where people are less likely to help someone in need when others are present.
Staub continued to study the causes of active bystandership as a professor at Stanford, Harvard University and UMass Amherst. UMass not only allowed Staub to create his own Ph.D. program on peace and violence, but permitted him to pursue various humanitarian projects during semester breaks.
“In a strange way I was lucky,” Staub said. “Given the research that I was doing, people were inviting me to come and do work in the real world. And given the work I was doing in the real world, people were inviting me to do other work in the real world.”
The Los Angeles Police Department invited Staub to create a police training program to prevent the level of police brutality seen against Rodney King, an African American man who became the central figure in a major police brutality case in that city in 1991. The program, called Ethical Policing Is Courageous (EPIC), sat on a shelf until civil rights attorney Mary Howell brought it to the New Orleans Police Department, the BBC reports.
“The purpose of the training was to have police officers intervene when their fellow officers engaged in unnecessary violence or actually try to prevent it, and if they couldn’t, then intervene,” Staub said. “Interventions can be pretty limited, like putting an arm around the shoulder of another officer who was about to do something problematic.”
After introducing the program, the New Orleans Office of the Independent Police Monitor’s 2024 report found that the number of critical incidents has decreased from 17 in 2014 to eight in 2024. The data shows that the downward trend of critical incidents saw a spike in 2020, the year people across the country flooded the streets after a Minneapolis police officer murdered George Floyd.
It was this tragedy that sparked an increased interest in the EPIC program. Georgetown University took the principles of Staub’s training and created the Active Bystandership for Law Enforcement (ABLE), a nationwide program working with police departments to establish a culture of intervention and prevention of excessive force. The initiative is still active today.
History is repeating
As Staub was writing his memoir, he began to see the core principles of violence becoming more prevalent in the United States. Hostility between national and ethnic groups, political and economic instability and the “us-versus-them” mentality came into the mainstream, particularly since President Donald Trump took office in 2016.
“Trump and the people working with him intensely degrade many groups of people now as alien, as not American,” Staub said.
The warning signs blaring, Staub ends his recent memoir with an analysis of his teachings in today’s political landscape. These actions are rooted in generosity and community building, like doing “unusual acts of kindness” or engaging with others outside of ethnic, racial and socioeconomic boundaries. When students simulate these behaviors in his UMass classes, the exercises often lead to lasting relationships.
Staub has seen these methods work in real-world scenarios. In the aftermath of the Rwandan Genocide of 1994, Staub trained Rwandans to lead workshops on the causes and impact of mass violence against Tutsis by Hutu forces. He worked with a Dutch television and film producer to create a radio drama covering the same topics, which ran nearly 20 years.
The results recorded in his papers were an increased openness to collaboration between groups and a decrease in trauma symptoms. Tutsis were also willing to forgive the Hutus if they admitted wrongdoing, a phenomenon called “conditional forgiveness.”
Marc Skvirsky, vice president and chief program officer emeritus at the nonprofit Facing History & Ourselves, says, “Staub’s memoir … illuminates the development of his influential ideas about empathy, moral agency, and the prevention of violence, and shows how those ideas have been put into practice in classrooms, NGOs, police departments, and divided societies around the world. Inspiring and indispensable, this book is an essential guide for anyone committed to building a more just, humane and democratic world.”
Facing History & Ourselves is an international education organization that equips educators with resources and training to teach middle and high school students about racism, antisemitism and prejudice.
The concepts and practices of active bystandership have far outgrown Staub’s reach. Teachers at Jabish Brook Middle School in Belchertown saw students learn to call out microaggressions and bullying after going through the Anti-Defamation League’s No Place for Hate program. The LUCE Immigrant Justice Network of Massachusetts holds active bystander training to prepare neighbors to protect immigrants from Immigration Customs and Enforcement activity. Quabbin Mediation in Orange runs a Training Active Bystanders program to equip western Massachusetts residents with mediation and moral courage.
The prevalence of the concepts Staub spent his life researching and spreading gives him immense hope for a brighter future.
“I love it,” Staub said. “The more it is happening, the less passive people are, the more we are all making a difference.”
In an introduction to his memoir, Staub sums up his mission: “My aim has been to describe the evil I and many others have experienced, as well as how my associates and I worked to prevent evil; the caring and altruism of people and their heroic actions; and how we worked to promote goodness. In so doing I hope to inspire active bystandership and thereby make a positive difference in the world.”
