The tiny theater seemed jammed, 16 of its 21 seats occupied on a raw Saturday.

Partway through the movie, a woman left, saying as she went, “Hitler murdered 6 million Jews. Six Million. Jews. He murdered them.” Not yelling, but talking for the other 15 of us to hear.

The movie was “The Zone of Interest,” a film depicting the family life of a fictional commandant of the grisly Auschwitz death camp in Poland. The film showed the commandant and his family living their daily lives, even as distant gunshots punctuated the dialogue and smoke from tall chimneys occasionally framed a scene.

“The Zone of Interest,” which runs through April 18 at the Maine Film Center in Waterville, won the 2024 Academy Award for Best International Feature Film. It brings to life Hannah Arendt’s head-turning phrase “the banality of evil,” which may have set off the woman in the theater. I understand her protest. My older sister converted to Judaism, and one DNA analysis shows our family has small Jewish strains, both Ashkenazi and Sephardic.

Transfer Europe’s climate of 80 years ago to today, and our family might feel threatened, too. Not only from neo-Nazis who want to destroy democracy but from people who see the danger but do little to thwart it. They are the threat that Arendt, a Holocaust survivor, saw so clearly.

“The sad truth is that most evil is done by people who never make up their minds to be good or evil,” she wrote in “The Life of the Mind.” Maybe their upbringing didn’t require that of them.

I recall, while on the board of directors of School Administrative District 9 (Mount Blue), a presentation that included a statement that schools ought not teach morality. I don’t recall the overall topic, but as often happens, a side issue stuck in my mind, the issue of teaching morality.

In 1917, an organization called the Character Education Association outlined 10 rules of “right living.” They were, “self-control, good health, kindness, sportsmanship, self-reliance, duty, reliability, truth, good workmanship and teamwork.”

That seems a pretty reasonable moral base, and I don’t see the guidelines as favoring one or another religion, which is part of the justification for not teaching morality. In fact, I’d say any religion that doesn’t teach these rules isn’t much of a religion.

Mallory Hutchings-Tryon of the University of Washington has taught in K-12 schools nationwide. She wrote in January in Time magazine, “Recent evidence suggests that public schools across the nation are not providing an education in civic morality.”

Here’s an example of the consequences. Ebony Parker, former assistant principal at Richneck Elementary School in Newport News, Virginia, was “indicted for failing to act when a student’s behavior threatened the safety of the entire school,” The New York Times reported on Tuesday.

On Jan. 6, 2023, a 6-year-old pupil shot his teacher, Abigail Zwerner, the bullet passing through her hand and into her chest. Zwerner and other teachers have sued Parker who, their suit says, “ignore(d) and downplay(ed) concerns expressed by teachers.”

Lawyers for the teachers said Parker’s style “was to permit students to engage in dangerous and disruptive conduct and impose no consequence for breaking the rules, thereby placing all persons in the vicinity of the school and in the community at risk.” After each incident of acting out, he was briefly disciplined, then returned to the classroom.

The day of the shooting, Parker was told the boy had claimed to have a gun, the lawsuit said, but she replied the boy’s “pockets were too small to hold a handgun and did nothing.” The assistant principal was aware of the danger, as millions of Germans were aware of the Holocaust, but didn’t act to head off future cases.

Here’s a second example. As war grinds on in Gaza, thousands of civilians have been killed, wounded and/or driven from their houses. The organization that rules Gaza, Hamas, has called them innocents. And in a strict sense, many are.

But the people of Gaza elected Hamas in 2006 and didn’t resist a year later when Hamas beat the rival Palestinian Authority in a brief war. They remained silent as Hamas dug more than 300 miles of tunnels, many of them under hospitals and schools to provide cover for Hamas fighters.

Willfully silent, perhaps. It is no more plausible that ordinary Gazans didn’t know about the tunnels than it was plausible that ordinary Germans didn’t know about the Holocaust.

(Yes, we have dozens of “on the other hands” here, notably that Israeli Prime Minister Bejamin Netanyahu doesn’t want peace because he will almost certainly lose his office then, and faces years in prison for corruption when he is no longer immune from prosecution.)

Back to Hannah Arendt, who wrote in her report, “Eichmann in Israel,” in The New Yorker: “Evil comes from a failure to think. It defies thought for as soon as thought tries to engage itself with evil and examine the premises and principles from which it originates, it is frustrated because it finds nothing there. That is the banality of evil.”

Bob Neal first learned of the banality of evil from Professor Bill Daly at the University of Missouri — Kansas City. Bill died this winter. His lessons, both classroom and life, live on in his students. Neal can be reached at bobneal@myfairpoint.net.

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