Looking evil in the face

After viewing a new documentary on the Holocaust in Ukraine, a harrowed George Pitcher ponders his duty not to look away.

George Pitcher

George is a visiting fellow at the London School of Economics and an Anglican priest.

A mother cradles a child while another stands close by. They wear winter clothes of the 1940s and are amidst others waiting.

A Jewish family at Lubny, Urkaine, prior to the massacre there.

Hamburger Institut für Sozialforschung.

It’s a commonplace to remark that Ukraine has a troubled history. It’s almost a means of assimilating its current Russian conflict; Ukrainians are used to suffering and fighting, so here we go again.

But, lest we forget, it’s as well to be reminded on a regular basis of the nature of Ukraine’s suffering. This week, Channel 4 broadcast a documentary called Ukraine: Holocaust Ground Zero, which traced through contemporaneous photography, academic commentary and survivors’ witness how Ukrainian Jews suffered and died in their hundreds of thousands, perhaps as many as 1.6 million, at the hands of Nazis, Soviets and Ukrainian nationalists.

Vocabulary fails. Harrowing doesn’t begin to touch the experience of watching a programme like this. But, I think, watch it we must, especially those with a religious faith who use words like hope and faith.

The “problem of evil”, known in scholastic circles as theodicy, has been a stumbling block for the Christian faith for centuries. If God is all-powerful, the problem states, he cannot love us if he allows this to happen; if he loves us, he cannot be all-powerful for it to happen. Ergo, he cannot both be all-powerful and all-loving.

Counter-arguments, which needn’t detain us here, are many and varied: That the gift of free will includes the freedom to abandon God for evil; that the light of love shines brightest in darkness; that the world is fallen – lapsarian – and has to find its way back to the Garden; that God is joined to the suffering of humanity on the cross.

After Channel 4’s film, I have to say that I’m less interested in all that than in what it actually means for us in a practical sense. I’m left wondering less why than how. I don’t want to know why God allows it. I want to know how we respond.

Allow me to say, as honestly as I can, how I literally responded to this documentary. I had to watch it alone, on Channel 4’s website. I wonder why that is. Perhaps watching it with someone else is too much like entertainment. Perhaps there’s a fear that the act of sharing is dissipating in some way. Perhaps it’s a dirty little secret that I wanted to watch it, through clenched fingers.

The second literal reaction I’d record is that when a photograph appeared of one of the most grotesque (though relativity here is invidious) perpetrators of the mass-murders, SS-Obergruppenführer Friedrich Jeckeln, I found myself saying at his image on the screen “rot in hell”.

I find it hard to believe in a place of unending torment to which a benign God despatches human souls. I do believe in the hells, like this one in Ukraine, that men like him can create on earth. But I knew I’d found the limit of a human forgiveness and this was infinitely beyond it. And somehow I wished there was an eternal damnation to which Jeckeln could be consigned.

A third reaction to identify is more passive. I had to watch it – or, rather, I couldn’t look away. Please God, may that not be said to be curiosity. Surely not, when you know how scarring it will be.

It contained (and here perhaps I should issue a trigger warning for the rest of this paragraph) details of how the death squads moved on from men of military age to women and children, because they were too expensive to feed; how 90 orphaned children were murdered in one massacre for the same reason; how Jeckeln developed a system of execution to maximise space in mass graves called “sardines”.

I’m conscious of the title of the site for which I’m writing when I say that what is seen can’t be unseen and the horror must stay with anyone who watched this programme. To look away is to conspire with a pretence that it isn’t there or couldn’t have happened.

I wonder whether that means the Christian bears a duty not to look away, any more than we can look away from an innocent, naked young man left hanging in the midday sun, nailed to a cross. In witnessing these horrors, we’re not being brave, we’re acknowledging human reality.

And that human reality means that it really is no good saying “never again”. From the ethnic cleansing of Muslims in the Bosnian war, to the Rwandan genocide of the Tutsi minority in the Nineties, to the Iranian mass graves of dissidents being revealed even today, that is a failed resolution.

So is a faith in vain? It’s hard to argue a case for the divine in the face of 91-year-old Janine Webber, who says quietly on Channel 4:

“They killed my brother. They buried him alive. He was seven.”

Meanwhile, 86-year-old Bella Chernovets says of that countless million-plus:

“God keep them in paradise.”

Perhaps, we pray like that. I don’t know.

It’s impossible to conclude a column like this without being glib, or fumbling for closure. Because there are no conclusions. So I’ll just stop here.

Snippet

Character

Comment

Politics

9 September 2025

3 min read

After Angela, who's next?

Rayner’s resignation should prompt politicians to pause

Jean Kabasomi

Jean is a consultant working with financial and Christian organisations. She also writes and broadcasts.

Angela Rayner pauses while delivering a speech

x.com/mhclg

The dust is settling after the resignation of Angela Rayner, British Deputy Prime Minister. It’s not yet clear if her downfall will be fatal for her long-term political ambition. However, the manner of it had me muttering to myself. ‘If you live by the sword, you die by the sword.’ We all make mistakes. Angela Rayner made a mistake and it is clear that she broke the ministerial code. Do I think she should have resigned? It’s not as clear cut. Yes and no.

Yes, because I think we need our politicians to maintain the highest standards. I think she should have resigned as soon as she realised, she had made the mistake. She probably didn’t need to wait for the conclusion of the ethics investigation.

At the same time, no, because I don’t think it was a deliberate attempt to dodge paying the right amount of stamp duty. Instead, she greatly underestimated the significance and implications of not seeking the relevant tax advice. I am sure, some of us have seen those, ‘this is not legal/tax/financial advice’ statements on communications from banks and lawyers. and chose to ignore them, thinking they apply to someone else and not specifically us.

But as follower of politics, I remember Angela Rayner regularly lambasted Conservative minsters for similar tax infringements. There was never any consideration for the families of those ministers or the impact of her accusations on the mental health or careers of said politicians. Sadly, her actions have come back to haunt her and, as is to be expected, led to cries of hypocrisy. That’s why the Prime Minister had no choice but to accept her resignation. If she (and the Labour Party more generally) had been less combative and judgemental, and focused less on highlighting class and wealth differences, Angela Rayner may not have had to fall on her sword? Maybe an apology would have been enough? Many of us sympathise with her complex caring responsibilities and agree that the tax system is unnecessarily complicated. There could have been grace. But if you live by the sword, you will eventually die by the sword.

This whole episode has reminded me of the importance of treating people as I would like to be treated. We are all prone to making mistakes. We are all guilty of hypocrisy both intentionally and unintentionally. That doesn’t mean we can’t speak truth or hold people to account.

In the last week, every major political Party leader has been asked to comment on Angela Rayner and her purchase of an £800k flat in Hove hundreds of miles away from her constituency. I was impressed by Ed Davey’s (Leader of the Liberal Democrats) response to this ‘Hovegate’ saga. He was graceful, acknowledging the difficulty Rayner faced balancing a huge job alongside her caring and parental responsibilities, and the complexities of the tax system. But at the same time, accepted that politicians ought to be held to the highest ethical standards. He tried to shine a light on the underlying policy issues Rayner’s resignation rests on, and how to fix them.

Wouldn’t be great if this incident led to real conversations about policy reform to stamp duty and parent/carer responsibilities instead of party-political machinations? What if our politicians spent a little bit of time thinking about what it would be like to live in the opposing team’s shoes? We might just get better politics and policy.

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