“Were you here during the war?
For fifteen years, Father Patrick Desbois, a Catholic priest from Paris, has combed countless villages throughout Eastern Europe, asking that question of elderly residents. With his unassuming manner and clerical garb, people gladly open up him; many even invite him home for meals.
But these are no idle chats. When he finds people who lived in the village during World War II, Father Desbois then asks: were you here when the Jews were killed?
Far from recoiling at his questions, many witnesses seem almost glad to finally talk about those days when they witnessed their town’s Jews murdered en masse. In over one hundred research trips, yielding 4,485 videotaped testimonies, Father Desbois has uncovered 1,744 hitherto unknown, unmarked execution sites and mass graves. His work has revised estimates of the number of Jews killed in the Holocaust upward by up to half a million victims.
Father Desbois has uncovered 1,744 hitherto unknown, unmarked execution sites and mass graves.
Father Desbois’ interest in his work began as a young man. Growing up on his family’s farm in the Burgundy region of France, he was surrounded by secrets of the Holocaust – though he didn’t know it. His mother told him only recently that during the Second World War, their family sheltered dozens of Resistance members on their farm. A family cousin was killed in a concentration camp for her Resistance activities.
The biggest secret of all came from Father Desbois’ beloved grandfather Cornelius. The two were very close, but there was one episode in his life that his grandfather never talked about: his years imprisoned in a POW camp near the Ukrainian town of Rawa-Ruska during the war. He would only say “for us it was bad, for others it was worse.” As he grew up, Father Desbois realized his grandfather was referring to the town’s approximately 15,000 Jews.
Young Patrick developed an interest in Jews and Judaism. He studied Hebrew and visited Israel. Once he became a priest, he worked for the Catholic Church as a liaison to the Jewish community in Paris. He was offered the chance to visit Rawa-Ruska in 2002. He longed to see where his grandfather was held and was also interested in learning more about the fate of the town’s Jews. The visit enraged him and changed the direction of his life.
Meeting the town’s mayor, Father Desbois asked, “Mr. Mayor, where were all the Jews from the village buried?” Over a decade later, his anger and frustration with the official’s uncaring response is still palpable. “The mayor turned to stare at me and then, with an absent air, said ‘We didn’t know anything about that’.”
As he spoke with local officials, Father Desbois realized “everyone seemed to be ignorant of – or eager to hide – the very existence of the ten thousand Jews who had been shot in this little town back in 1942.” Father Desbois was shocked. “Ten thousand people shot cannot go unnoticed. I come from a small village and I know that if one person had been shot there, everyone would remember it – imagine ten thousand!”
A new mayor was elected and Father Desbois returned, asking again about the fate of Rawa-Ruska’s many Jewish citizens. As he recounted in a 2012 interview, the new mayor led him into a forest where about 50 elderly villagers were gathered in a semicircle. “You are standing on the graves of the last 1,500 Jews of Rawa-Ruska,” the mayor told him.
Father Desbois in Bogdanivka, Ukraine, July 16, 2007
where 48,000 Jews were executed over a 3-week period in Dec. 1942.
The Villagers Share Their Stories
One by one, the elderly locals stepped forward and shared their memories of the war. Children or teenagers at the time, many of them helped the Nazis round up truckload after truckload of Jews and bring them to this clearing. They told him how they helped guard the Jews to prevent any escapes as the Jews were forced to dig pits. They served the German soldiers food and brought them a gramaphone so they could listen to music. They watched as the Germans shot the Jews, dumping their bodies into the pits. One woman told Father Desbois that her job had been to pick tree branches and use them to cover the dead bodies so the next group of Jews wouldn’t see. She was 14 at the time. When the last of the Jews had been shot, they had filled in the pits with earth.
Father Desbois was the first outsider the villagers had told this to. Many asked him, “Why are you coming so late? We have been waiting for you.” In 2004, Father Desbois established Yahad-in-Unum. Yahad in Hebrew means together and Unum is one in Latin. Funded by mainly by a Holocaust Foundation in France and the Catholic Church, it’s the only body dedicated to gathering testimony like this and documenting the location of the untold number of Jewish mass graves in Eastern Europe.
The Einsatzgruppen shot dead over 1.5 million Jews following the strict rule: one Jew, one bullet.
The task is daunting. While millions of Jews who died in the Holocaust were murdered in death camps such as Auschwitz, millions more were shot in Eastern Europe after Germany invaded the Soviet Union in 1941 where the task of murdering Europe’s Jews fell to mobile execution units called Einsatzgruppen. Unlike the deadly gas used in many death camps, the Einsatzgruppen used bullets. Jews were typically told to gather in a place because they were going to be transported to Palestine. Instead they were shot and their bodies buried in unmarked mass graves.
In order to save money, Nazi killing squads in the Soviet Union operated according to a strict rule: one Jew, one bullet. Father Desbois calls these murders of over 1.5 million Jews the “Holocaust of Bullets”.
It was also, until recently, largely secret. Not only were the mass graves unmarked, towards the end of World War II, another Nazi division – the Sonderaktion 1005 – was charged with erasing evidence of earlier atrocities, often exhuming some of the bodies in mass graves and burning them.
A Race Against Time
“I am running against time," Father Desbois said in 2009. "We have a maximum of six or seven years if we take into account the age of the witnesses because they are so old. Sometimes you arrive in the village and are told 'I'm sorry, Father, but Madame Anna died just one month ago and she was the last witness. And now nobody knows any more.' So I see time is short and we need to achieve our goal as quickly as possible, which is why we must multiply our energy."
Today, Father Desbois continues his work among the very last witnesses to these atrocities. Travelling with a team including translators, photographers, videographers and ballistics experts, he laboriously tracks down and documents every story. Many of these are chilling. (Note: the details that follow may be disturbing to read.)
One woman described her “job” after a massacre of Jews in her village: to walk across the fallen corpses to flatten them before another group of Jews was shot.
Jan, from Poland described seeing the site of a mass grave: “We could see the blood bubbling.”
Anna, from Ukraine, remembered “They were screaming, the children were crying. When the pit was full they filled it with (a) little earth. For three days the ground moved. Some were still alive.
Gheorghe, an elderly man in Moldova, took Father Desbois to a ravine near his village and described what happened: "The Jews were facing the ditch, so they were shooting them in the back of their heads or their backs to fall into the ditch. They were shooting them as if they were dogs."
Another woman described seeing her Jewish friend in line to be shot – and how her friend comforted her, saying “Don’t cry, don’t cry—we are going to Palestine.”
One man named Dimitri was 16 when he watched Nazi’s kill his area’s Jews. Nazis and locals worked together, shooting groups of 20 Jews at a time. The killing went on for two weeks, he described. In all, over 18,000 were shot.
At times, witnesses recall the names of the murdered Jews. 80 year old Anatoly was able to remember: Brick, Gorovich, Shurman, and Folst. Without his interview, those names would be forgotten.
Others recalled how German soldiers drummed on empty buckets to drown out the screams of their victims.
The silence shrouding these events contrasts sharply with the public knowledge that these massacres were happening at the time. As well as documenting the massacres and mass graves, Father Desbois says he wants to show that the murder of Jews was publicly known, even celebrated. “On the evening of the killing they would organize a party for the shooters," he explains. There was food, drink, music, dancing and women." These parties travelled with the death units, as they moved from village to village. “They were running when they heard when they were killing Jews, to see, to try to catch a coin, to check out your clothes, to take a picture. They wanted to be there.”
As he methodically moves from village to village, Father Desbois leaves little trace behind. He has brought rabbis to the sites of mass graves he’s discovered in order to sanctify them as Jewish cemeteries – but due to fears of looting, he does not mark or otherwise identify the graves at the site. Embraced by Jews around the world, Father Desbois also faces enemies. He keeps the location of his home in Paris secret and has received threats because of his work.
In his race against time, Father Desbois explains what helps motivate him in the face of almost unthinkable horror. “I try to think really concretely of these people not as a millions or just mathematics,” he has explained. Instead, he focuses on the concrete: “I am looking for the tombs of Isaac, Rebecca and Dora," he says.
“You cannot leave Europe with thousands of unknown unmarked graves,” Father Desbois explains, “or we deny all our values. We cannot build a safe Europe and a modern world and ask people to keep silent. Otherwise we justify the next genocide. It is the ultimate victory to Hitler if we don't bury the victims."
Father Desbois recounts his story in his book, The Holocaust By Bullets: A Priest’s Journey to Uncover the Truth Behind the Murder of One and A Half Million Jews by Father Patrick Desbois
(19) Jane, November 14, 2017 8:22 PM
Thank you Father Desbois for uncovering this atrocity in the villages and countryside of Europe. It is timely and important. I presume through feelings of guilt and complicity on the part of the surviving elderly villagers who are able to now disclose the details, these people have lived with this information that must have created a huge hollow of darkness in their lives. To have been a party to such a horror and remained silent until now shows a complicity and evil that will have influenced their everyday life. So that now the graves cannot be marked with a memorial for fear of looting, which could only occur by the generations being influenced and following their parents and grandparents influence of deep seated antisemitism. Interestingly they are comfortable talking to the Catholic priest about these crimes, perhaps they think they will be absolved of them by this act, the Catholic church was a part of every village in these regions, the villagers would have been by and large predominantly Catholic.I wonder if they ever took these crimes to the confessonal, and if so the village priest would have had a wealth of information re these crimes against the Jews. The Catholic church was silent in Europe!! So preporting to following the G-d of Israel they thought they could kill his people! Not too smart!! Ha Shem does not forget.
(18) Anonymous, November 14, 2017 1:45 PM
Amen! An amazing man. G-d willing, may Moshiach come and may tragedies like this cease!
(17) Bobby5000, October 26, 2016 4:14 PM
What did you do when the children were being murdered- in Syria.
Sorry, when children are being killed as we speak, in Syria, I cannot justify academic discussion of what was or should have been done 75 years ago. I cannot justify investigation or research which cannot change what occurred, and reject the opportunity to help now.
The challenges are profound and a mere 3 years ago, we thought Assad was the bad guy, and now we see a different side. What should be done and how, I am not sure how to answer that. I do know that a righteous person needs to think about the issues and intervene or help when he can. I would hope that stories here will address that.
(16) Mike, March 16, 2016 10:59 PM
obscuring the truth
However well the Holocaust is documented, it is documented for sure.
In how far the victims really need this, hard to say.
To bemoan a fate of others, to call the Holocaust wrong is not something very ununsual in Europe.
One might think that condemning the Holocaust has a connection to being a good person, however all too often do we see in Europe (in general) that significant parts of the population on the one hand would readily condemn the Holocaust and at the same time voice antisemitic views and opinions.
We wish it weren't so but it is.
I don't know this priests motivation but it is clearly purposely or not distracting from the obvious:
The catholic church has since its inception killed millions of Jews.
(15) Yehudit, February 9, 2016 10:32 PM
May G*d Bless you.
I hope that those who have offered information have made contact. If not, please, please go through the contact page on this web site.
May G*d Bless and Keep you all.
(14) Faith, November 30, 2015 12:27 AM
I never knew
Like so many American Jews, we never knew what was REALLY going on. What turns man into animals? And, the Nazi's were worse than animals. In the animal kingdom, most of the creatures kill for food, for safety, etc. The Nazi's basically murdered because they COULD! No one was around to stop them! No one thought nothing of the Jews being massicured, and look where we are today.Another enemy of the Jews are lurking in our mist - and no one does anything! Sound familiar?
(13) Frank G, November 10, 2015 8:47 PM
Father Des Bois You are a Good Man Thank G-D
don't know how those villagers who helped Nazis kill Jews
can sleep at night.Help keep Israel Strong
(12) Tzippy, November 10, 2015 2:41 AM
G-d bless Father Desbois
Thank you for your tireless work for my people. May G-d bless you and yours.
(11) H.E.Brown, November 10, 2015 1:38 AM
Truth behind the Murders.
Interesting how much cover up there is. If they did no wrong ( they the murders) there would be no need to try to cover things up and try to erase there deeds. Interesting how that works.
(10) Daniel Kelly, November 10, 2015 12:57 AM
I fear that the world has forgotten the atrocities of the Holocaust and it will be repeated again in a even greater measure May God forgive them for what they did May we never forget
Laine Frajberg, November 11, 2015 2:34 PM
Forgiveness
I doubt that the deity is prepared to forgive the Germans and Ukrainians.I know I'm not.
Sandra, November 11, 2015 5:23 PM
Forgiveness
It's probably unnecessary to speak for the Deity on the topic of forgiveness. And when you take a minute to look into the topic of Genocides in History, you'll find out that the Germans and Ukrainians don't have any kind of corner on that activity. Almost every nation, peoples and religion has had a go at it. EVERYONE needs to learn from it every day.
Laine Frajberg, November 13, 2015 6:22 AM
Forgiveness
Why should I forgive the people (Germans and Ukrainians) who murdered my relatives at Babi Yar,Treblinka,and Majdanek?The immediate post-war Germans claimed to have known nothing about what was going on in German occupied Europe and thus not responsible for what their government did.The present day Germans say they aren't responsible for what their grand parents did.And the Ukrainians (post 1991)
have never expressed any remorse at all for what some of their people did.Matter of fact,some of of them think those murderous acts were wonderful.(My neighbour was one of the killers and the only thing he regretted is that he didn't kill MORE Jews.)
Anonymous, November 15, 2015 2:24 AM
Easy to say...it seems that no one in your family was killed by those murderers so you are learning from the experience of others and even giving advice to those who went through or their family the inimaginable suffering. Do you know that the Vatican not only helped the nazis escape to South America but also the pope sent greetings to hitler for his birthday every year...
Anonymous, November 15, 2015 2:10 AM
And you are right it is unforgivable
How can one forgive such a horror?
(9) Alan, November 9, 2015 11:05 PM
Lots of continuing info on the Holocaust, almost none on the Holodomor. Unfortunate that 7 to 12 million Ukrainians starved and are now forgotten.
(8) Marc, November 9, 2015 4:36 PM
A Righteous Person
כל הכבוד
(7) Yehudis Feinstein, November 9, 2015 6:29 AM
Meis Mitzva -- Burying the Dead
Bs"D Patrick Desbois is a Tzaddik. Hashem will give you your reward in Gan Eden for your selfless devotion to honor the Jews murdered and left in unmarked graves. G-d bless you.
(6) anonymous, November 9, 2015 4:30 AM
Phenomenal human being. He is a blessing.
(5) Sabus, November 8, 2015 7:59 PM
Oh! God please let this man be safe and sound.
(4) Robert, November 8, 2015 7:24 PM
Child of the Righteous.
DEBORAH, November 9, 2015 8:43 AM
NO. HIS FATHER WAS NOT A SAINT
FIRST - TO LET YOU KNOW THAT I READ THE BOOK, SO THIS IS WHAT HE WRITES.... IT IS BECAUSE OF HIS FATHER SILENT AFTER THE WAR THAT THE INTRIGED SON WANTED TO KNOW.... AND THIS IS WHAT HE DISCOVERED.
HIS GREATNESS IS TO DEDICATE HIS TIME AND LIFE TO CONFRONT THE CITIZENS OF THESE CITIES WITH THEIR PAST. AND ALSO REVEAL THIS KIND OF 'SILENT' PART OF THE WWII ...
(3) Fay, November 8, 2015 6:13 PM
May God abundantly bless him...
... in his holy mission.
(2) Gershon, November 8, 2015 5:46 PM
amazing work
It seems that Patrick Desbois has been thoroughly decorated and been given a number of honorary doctorates for his team's work. And rightfully so.
This article should have added a link to the project;
http://www.yahadinunum.org/?lang=en
it has an interactive map with testimonial videos and photos for each town.
(1) Anonymous, November 8, 2015 2:18 PM
Russian Jews
Whom is accounting for all the Jews that Stalin killed, and why do people not talk about Stalin and his killing of the Jewish people.?
Anonymous, November 9, 2015 4:59 AM
Stalin was more indiscriminate in his killing
Stalin was a less discriminating butcher. As many Jews as Stlin killed, he killed even more millions of kulaks and other non-Jews. Nor did he create an industrial infrastructure -- railroads, execution chambers and the rest -- for his evil. Horrible as he was, he never sank to the level of Hitler, and as awful as it is consider, had Stalin not wound up fighting against the Nazis, the outcome of the war might have been different and the loss of Jews even greater.