Patrick
Desbois
Catholic
priest
D. grew up on the family farm in the Bresse region of eastern France. His
grandfather was deported to a prison camp for French soldiers in Rava-Ruska on the Ukrainian side of the Polish
border, told the family nothing about his experience. D.'s mother told him only recently that the family hid dozens of resisters on the
farm.
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. D. started as a parish priest, studying Judaism and learning Hebrew during a stint in Israel.
D. is head of the Commission for Relations with Judaism of the French Bishops' Conference and Consultant to the Vatican. In 2004 he founded the organization Yahad – In
Unum, and is now its president. Co-founders are the French cardinals
Jean-Marie Lustiger, Philippe Barbarin and Jean-Pierre Ricard and Rabbi
Israel Singer and Serge Cwajgenbaum of the World Jewish Congress. The
organization is backed and largely financed by the Holocaust foundation in
France and the Catholic Church. In 2007 D. was honored by the American Jewish Committee with its "Jan Karski Award" for his "efforts to identify the mass graves of Jewish victims of the
Shoah".
The task of Yahad – In Unum is to collect more informations about the mass killing of the Jews in the area of todays Ukraine between 1941 and 1945. Ukrainian contemporary witnesses are interviewed about the mass shootings which took place next to their home and the mass graves are located. Desbois himself estimates that there are no less than 1 million victims buried in 1,200 graves in Ukraine. The
location of nearly all of the graves is unknown to any Holocaust researcher.
D. is doing the interviews with the witnesses himself.
D.
relies on the archive of Soviet-era documents housed in the Holocaust museum in Washington, as well as German trial
archives. He registers an execution or a grave site after obtaining three
witnesses. When D. and his team arrive in a village, nobody knows that Jews have been
killed, and nobody knows where the corpses are. D.
therefore asks the first old person, "Were you here during the war?"
That person will bring him to a friend who was present at the execution. Or
he goes to see the priest, whot calls in the parish: "Who was present at the
execution?" Or he goes to the main shop to wait for the old people to come. And slowly
he finds his witnesses.
In 2002, visiting
Rava-Ruska, and knowing that 10,000 Jews had been killed there, D. asked the mayor where the Jews were buried. The mayor said he did not
know. The following year, a new mayor took D. to a forest where about 100 villagers had gathered in a semicircle, waiting to tell their stories and to help uncover the graves buried beneath their
feet. On
one mass grave, D. found 5,700 German cartridges. Each cartridge had its date and the brand of fabrication. There
were no Soviet cartridges, so it was clear, it was not a battle.
Witness
Vera Filonok said she was 16 when she watched in Konstantinovka 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. 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. The Nazis were allowed only one bullet to the back per victim.
Therefore, the Jews sometimes were buried alive. These pits moved for three
days, how it breathed. D. also found many eyewitnesses of the testing of the gas vans by the Nazis.
In the region of Kherson, Ukrainian eyewitnesses have testified that they saw the Nazis load the gas vans with jewish children while their parents and the other adults were marched out of
town, to be shot at the execution sites.
Over four
years, D. has videotaped more than 700 of these interviews with witnesses and bystanders and has identified more than 600 common graves of
Jews, most of them previously unknown. He also has gathered material evidence of the execution of Jews from 1941 to 1944, the “Holocaust of
bullets” as it is called. Unlike Poland and Germany, the Holocaust was hidden
away, first by the Nazis, then by the Soviets. The results of D.’s research
- including video interviews, wartime documents, photographs of newly uncovered mass graves, rusty bullets and shell casings and personal possessions of the victims
- are on display at the Memorial of the Shoah in the Marais district of
Paris. One photo from 1942 shows a German police officer shooting Jews at
the edge of a pit.
Anschrift
von / Address of D.:
Werke von / Works of D.:
Literatur über
/ Writings concerning D.:
Literatur
im Katalog der Deutschen Nationalbibliothek von und über
/
Writings
in the catalogue of Deutsche Nationalbibliothek of and about
:
Patrick Desbois
Letzte Änderung / Last update: 01.06.2008
|
