Don’t Look Away

Recently, a documentary told the story of several photographs taken secretly inside the Warsaw Ghetto during the Second World War. The photographer was not a journalist but a young Polish firefighter who happened to witness the destruction of the ghetto during the uprising of 1943. In the midst of that terrible scene, he lifted a small camera and began to take pictures. He did not take them to explain what was happening. No photograph could do that. He took them so that what he was seeing would not disappear into silence—so that the world, someday, would have to look.

The images are difficult to see: faces marked by exhaustion and fear, streets reduced to rubble, human suffering caught in a moment that refuses to soften with time. Yet historians say those photographs matter for one simple reason: someone refused to look away. In a different way, that is what the Gospel writers do with the story we hear today. They do not look away from…