In an interview on Forgiveness

Your last book, Love and War in the Apennines by Eric Newby, looks at the time he spent in Italy during the war.

This is very personal. There is a great moment where Newby returns to the place where he was sheltered when he was an escaped prisoner of war. At the time he only had a few months of freedom, moving from house to house and working almost as a sort of slave labourer on a mountain farm. There were searches going on for escaped prisoners and the villagers tried to hide him and ultimately built him a refuge in which he lived. Finally he was betrayed and recaptured. In the epilogue he goes back after the war to see them all. At one point he is asked whether he wants to know who betrayed him because the other villagers have found out. The man tells Newby that his betrayer was sitting quite near him the day before at dinner: does he want to know who it was? And Eric Newby says, ‘No, I really don’t. There have been enough accusations and counter-accusations. Just let it be.’ That is acceptance, but is it forgiveness?

I think the great act of forgiveness in literary terms is Christ’s forgiveness on the cross, when he looks down and says, ‘Father forgive them for they know not what they do.’ The qualification – their ignorance – is presumably why they are forgiven.  However, all the people in these books knew damn well what they were doing. The betrayer of Eric Newby knew. Apparently he betrayed him because he was a convinced Fascist and he came round to the view that he shouldn’t cease to be a Fascist just because the Fascists were losing the war. He believed in Fascism and this Englishman was an enemy of Fascism and should therefore be handed over to the authorities. That was the rationale, and that made it a very conscious act. Would Christ have said, ‘Father forgive them, even if they know exactly what they are doing?’ I don’t know. Similarly, with the Nazis destroying European Jews: the Nazis knew exactly what they were doing. Should they be forgiven?