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November 9, 2008
French priest uncovers massacres of Eastern Europe
Father Patrick Desbois doesn’t seem a likely candidate to confront the forces of evil.
The French priest speaks quietly, with a heavy accent, and a sincerity that stamps each word with the note of truth.
For seven years, he has been uncovering the story of the Jews of Eastern Europe in World War II, not gassed in Nazi death camps, but shot in or near their own villages.
Desbois shared his story Nov. 3 at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum 2008 luncheon at the Chicago Sheraton Hotel and Towers.
He told how, when he was a boy, his grandfather would not talk about the time he spent as a prisoner in the Rura-Ruska forced labor camp in Ukraine, saying only, “Inside the camp it was awful. Outside the camp, it was worse.”
Later, when Desbois visited Poland to prepare for a pilgrimage to Czestochowa, he got lost and found himself near Rura-Ruska. He made the connection between his priesthood and his grandfather’s story, and began learning about the fate of the Jews of Ukraine, Belarus, the Caucasus and other regions.
1.5 million shot
An estimated 1.5 million Jews were shot to death and left in unmarked mass graves, most of them not recorded in any official records. Those that are in the archives have mostly been despoiled, by people looking for gold in the teeth of the skulls.
When he traveled to the villages, he would look for people who were children during World War II and persuade them to tell him what happened.
“They say the graves moved,” Desbois said, explaining that most of the Jews who were shot were then buried alive.
Must work quickly
It’s imperative to work quickly, Desbois said, because the witnesses are aging, and when they die, no one will know where to look for the graves.
When Desbois finds a grave site, he and his team confirm it by using metal detectors to find the cartridges, one for each Jew that was shot. In most cases, they leave the graves covered, he said. Maps of the grave sites are being created and will be available on the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum’s Web site.
When people ask why he does this work, he talks about the story of the murder of Abel, when God asks Cain where his brother Abel is.
“God is asking, where is your brother from the Ukraine? Where is your brother from Belarus?”
Desbois wrote “The Holocaust by Bullets: A Priest's Journey to Uncover the Truth Behind the Murder of 1.5 Million Jews,” Palgrave Macmillan, New York, 2008, 272 pp. $26.95.
