Column

Comment

War & peace

7 September 2023

4 min read

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.

Column

Comment

Community

Economics

Holidays/vacations

31 July 2025

4 min read

Portofino’s real prisoners are not the beggars it is banning

The economic elite can’t exclude the poor from their privileged bubbles

George Pitcher

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

A colourful row of buildings in an Italian port.

Portofino's harbourside dining.

Slim Emcee on Unsplash.

I know Portofino a bit, because it’s nearby my Italian in-law family and we’ve been there a couple of times when visitors have wanted to see it. It’s a former fishing village on the Ligurian coast, a natural bay and beyond lovely. And its mayor, Matteo Viacava, has just banned beggars from its cobbled streets, as they irritate wealthy tourists and celebrity visitors, which is less lovely.

Italy struggles with its relationship with tourism. Rome was sinking under a pile of rubbish a few years ago. The more literally sinking Venice tries to repel visitors with taxes, while providing a backdrop welcome for mega-wealthy weddings. The walled Tuscan town of Lucca recently cracked down on the buttodentri, the restaurant touts who hustle diners. As with any European tourist destination, Airbnb apartments drive rental prices up and the indigenous population out.

There is something particular about the Portofino beggar purge though. Perhaps it’s a bit like Versailles before 1789 – in the case of Portofino, the poor have no clothes so let them wear Prada. It’s all designer boutiques and there isn’t a real shop, a paneterria or forno, to be found. No one carries any weight, naturally, but you do wonder how they eat at all, if not in one of the extortionately priced trattoria.

To visit, as thousands will this summer, is to realise how much there is that you don’t require. It has everything a rich visitor wants, but nothing that they actually need. We’ve heard people call it Disneyland Italy, but I think it’s more like Patrick McGoohan’s The Prisoner TV series, shot in another, similarly named, dystopian village, Portmeirion in North Wales, where everything is laid on except freedom. Even that’s not quite right – as The Eagles nearly wrote, in Portofino you can leave any time you want, you just can’t afford to check out, unless you’re loaded.

It strikes me now that the mysterious bubble that pursued the aspirant escapee McGoohan along the beach may have been a cunning metaphor. People who live in Portofino (and very few do), or who seek sanctuary there, or in Palm Beach, or on Long Island, or in St Moritz, or on Mustique, or in South Kensington, exist in a bubble.

Joining friend and foodie Loyd Grossman at the Chelsea Arts Club a while ago, he told me he’d just walked down from his home in South Kensington and seen not a single person who actually lived there, but only people who cleaned their houses. Residents arrive from and leave for the airport, often from subterranean garages, in privacy-glassed limos.

Like Portofino, these are bubbles from which anyone but their own demographic are excluded. It doesn’t have to have gates to be a gated community. The bubble is a psychological state, which is bought to protect us from those of lesser means and especially, God save us, from the poor.

Simply to have them removed is to have head and hearts dwelling in gated communities.

And, increasingly for the economic elite, the poor are anyone who cannot afford to, or are not forced to, separate themselves for security, because they have no access to a privileged bubble. That the poor are always with us is a gospel injunction, which I used to take at face value as a statement of apathy or resignation, even acceptance, in an inadequate world, that the poor are simply poor and there is nothing to be done about it.

Latterly, I’ve seen it far more in the post-modern sense of being present with the poor in their moment of poverty, in solidarity and in their corner. That means they share our space, as neighbours. We’re not just talking about the economically poor here, but the dispossessed and discarded; the vulnerable and volatile; the marginalised and maligned.

We, the rich, can’t afford to exercise zero tolerance, to pretend they don’t exist, because – to coin a phrase of George Osborne’s when, hilariously, he claimed as Chancellor of the Exchequer to be making common cause in austerity – we’re all in this together. And by “this” I mean the one, shared bubble, which is universal.

We’ve been considering tourists and beggars, but we can scale it up to famine in Gaza or Sudan; asylum seekers in small boats; prisoners in Guantanamo Bay or on death rows; those who face earthquakes and tsunamis. They can’t be made to disappear by magic or mayoral edict, only by addressing the circumstances of their poverty – of food, money or spirit – with practical, social and political policy, plus a dollop of compassion for the cause of their plight.

Simply to have them removed is to have head and hearts dwelling in gated communities. It’s not sufficient, for sure, to notice the beggars this summer, to drop a few euros, but it’s a start along the street towards knowing that the poor are indeed always here, with us. Even in Portofino.

Support Seen & Unseen

Since Spring 2023, our readers have enjoyed over 1,500 articles. All for free.
This is made possible through the generosity of our amazing community of supporters.

If you enjoy Seen & Unseen, would you consider making a gift towards our work?

Do so by joining Behind The Seen. Alongside other benefits, you’ll receive an extra fortnightly email from me sharing my reading and reflections on the ideas that are shaping our times.

Graham Tomlin
Editor-in-Chief

Pledge now