Byline: Pamela Bone

Circumstances are not to blame for evildoing. Individuals are. And they should be punished. began this as a reply to a letter from a reader who took me to task for a column I wrote on 9 June about the Miles Franklin Award winner, The Hand That Signed the Paper. Considering that my answer was taking almost as long to write as a column, considering that what one person bothers to write many people think and at the risk of causing to be sold even one more copy of what I remain convinced is a harmful book, I decided to turn my answer into another column. Without repeating everything I said earlier or that others have said since I found Helen Demidenko's book offensive because, in my opinion, it comes dangerously close to arguing that the Jews deserved what was done to them by those Ukrainians who collaborated with the Nazis; and because it makes a sympathetic figure out of a man who not only willingly participated in the machine-gunning of thousands of people but who could plunge a bayonet into a baby (my italics). What worried my correspondent was that I seemed to be saying that (he wrote) "some people are so evil that we should not try to even partly explain or understand their actions, lest we put ourselves in danger of condoning or excusing their depravity". When such people, he said, may have been the victims of...