Holocaust in Ukraine...
by and so it is...
this man, he is doing something very admirable...you should read this.
The French priest Patrick Desbois and members of his team walking to what used to be a well in Bogdanovka, Ukraine, where many Jews were thrown dead or still alive.
'Confessions' document Holocaust in Ukraine
PARIS: His subjects were mostly children and teenagers at the time, terrified witnesses to mass slaughter. Some were forced to work at the bottom rung of the Nazi Germany killing machine - as the diggers of mass graves, as cooks who fed Nazi soldiers, as seamstresses who mended clothes stripped from the Jews before execution.
The witnesses live today in rural poverty, many without running water or heat, nearing the end of their lives. So Patrick Desbois has been quietly seeking them out, roaming the back roads and forgotten fields of Ukraine, hearing their stories and searching for the unmarked common graves. He knows that they are an unparalleled source to document the murder of 1.5 million Ukrainian Jews, shot dead and buried throughout Ukraine.
He is neither a historian nor an archeologist, but a French Catholic priest. And his most powerful tools are his unadorned style - and his clerical collar.
The Nazis began killing the Jews in Ukraine following the German invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941. But with few exceptions, most notably the 1941 slaughter of nearly 34,000 Jews in the Babi Yar ravine in Kiev, much of that history has gone untold.
Knocking on doors unannounced, the 52-year-old cleric seeks to unlock the memories of Ukrainian villagers the way he might take confessions one by one in church.
"At first, sometimes, people don't believe I'm a priest," said Desbois in an interview during the past week. "I have to use simple words and listen to these horrors - without any judgment. I cannot react to the horrors that pour out. If I react, the stories will stop."
Over four years, Desbois has videotaped more than 700 witnesses and bystanders and identified more than 500 common graves of Jews, about 70 percent of them previously unknown. He also has gathered material evidence of the execution of Jews from 1941 to 1944, the "Holocaust of bullets," as the mass murder is called.
Often his subjects ask Desbois to stay for a meal and to pray, as if to somehow bless their acts of remembrance. He does not judge those who either willingly or unwillingly carried out tasks for the Nazis, and Holocaust scholars say that is one reason he is so effective.
"If a Jewish taker-of-testimony comes, what would people think - that this is someone coming to accuse," said Paul Shapiro, director of the Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington.
"When a priest comes, people open up. He brings to the subject a kind of legitimacy, a sense that it's O.K. to talk about the past. There's absolution through confession."
Unlike Poland and Germany, where the Holocaust remains visible through the searing symbols of the extermination camps, the horror in Ukraine was hidden away, first by the Nazis, then by the Soviets.
"There was nothing to see in Ukraine because people were shot to death with guns," said Thomas Eymond-Laritaz, president of the Victor Pinchuk Foundation, the largest Ukrainian philanthropic organization. "That's why Father Desbois is so important."
The foundation helped underwrite a conference on the subject at the Sorbonne University in Paris during the past week - the first to bring together Western and Ukrainian scholars - and has begun to fund some of Desbois's projects.
Some of Desbois's research - including video interviews, wartime documents, photographs of newly uncovered mass graves, rusty bullets and shell casings and personal possessions of the victims - is on display for the first time at an exhibit at the Memorial of the Shoah in Paris.
The exhibit shows, for example, the 15 mass graves of Jews in a commune called Busk that Desbois and his team discovered and began excavating after interviewing several witnesses. There is also a black-and-white photo from 1942 that shows a German police officer shooting naked Jewish women lying in a ravine in the Rivne region.
Desbois travels with a team that includes two interpreters, a photographer, a ballistics specialist, a mapping expert and a note-taker. Desbois records all the stories on video, sometimes holding the microphone himself, asking questions in simple language and a flat tone.
In Buchach, Ukraine, in 2005, Regina Skora told Desbois that as a young girl she witnessed executions.
"Did the people know they were going to be killed?" Desbois asked her.
"Yes."
"How did they react?"
"They just walked, that's all. If someone couldn't walk, they told him to lie on the ground and shot him in the back of the neck."
Vera Filonok said she watched from the porch of her mud hut in 1941 as thousands of Jews were shot, thrown into a pit and set on fire. Those who were still alive writhed "like flies and worms," she said.
There are stories of how the Nazis drummed on empty buckets to avoid having to listen to the screams of their victims, how Jewish women were made sex slaves of the Nazis and then executed. One witness said that as a 6-year-old, he hid and watched as his best friend was shot to death.
Other witnesses described how the Nazis were allowed only one bullet to the back per victim and that the Jews sometimes were buried alive. "One witness told of how the pit moved for three days, how it breathed," Desbois recalled.
Desbois became haunted by the history of the Nazis in Ukraine as a child growing up on the family farm in Burgundy, France. His paternal grandfather, who was sent to a prison camp for French soldiers in Rava-Ruska on the Ukrainian side of the border with Poland, told the family nothing about the experience.
But he confessed to his relentlessly curious grandson, "For us it was bad, for 'others' it was worse."
After teaching mathematics as a French government employee in West Africa and working in Calcutta for three months with Mother Teresa, he joined the priesthood.
He started as a parish priest, and studied Judaism and learned Hebrew during a stint in Israel. He asked to work with Gypsies, ex-prisoners or Jews, and was appointed as a bridge to the French Jewish community.
It was on a tour in 2002, while visiting Rava-Ruska, that he asked the mayor of the town where the Jews were buried. The mayor said he did not know.
"I knew that 10,000 Jews had been killed there, so it was impossible that he didn't know," Desbois recalled.
A year later, a new mayor took the priest to a forest where about 100 villagers had gathered in a semi-circle, waiting to tell their stories and to help uncover the graves buried beneath their feet.
He met other mayors and parish priests who helped find more witnesses. In 2004, Desbois created Yahad-In Unum, an organization devoted to Christian-Jewish understanding, operating from a office in Paris.
Only one-third of Ukraine has been covered so far, and it will take several more years to finish the research. A notice at the exit of the Paris exhibit asks that any visitor with information about victims of Nazi atrocities in Ukraine leave a note or send an e-mail message.
"People talk as if these things happened yesterday, as if 60 years didn't exist," Desbois said. "Some ask, 'Why are you coming so late? We have been waiting for you.' "
