Priest on hunt for unmarked mass graves of Holocaust
<http://www.canada.com/topics/news/national/story.html?id=08a3f96b-a653-4e4b-956c-1be4ea891d5e>http://www.canada.com/topics/news/national/story.html?id=08a3f96b-a653-4e4b-956c-1be4ea891d5e Canwest News Service Published: Tuesday, October 28, 2008 MONTREAL - Just when you thought everything had already been said about the Holocaust, along comes a French priest with a revelation: The skeletons of 1.5 million murdered Jews lie in unmarked mass graves in Ukraine, 700,000 more are in Belarus, and countless others are in Russia. Father Patrick Desbois has made it his life's mission to find them and document them. That means poring over German and Soviet wartime archives to locate each site, visiting villages to interview local witnesses, collecting shell casings used by Nazis, other Germans and local police who were involved, and ultimately, definitively, cataloguing the carnage of the killing fields of 1941 to 1944. Father Patrick Desbois, a Catholic priest from France tours the Father Patrick Desbois, a Catholic priest from France tours the museum of the Montreal Holocaust Memorial Centre Tuesday. Montreal Gazette Email to a friend Email to a friend Printer friendly Printer friendly Font: * * * * * * * * <http://www.addthis.com/bookmark.php> AddThis Social Bookmark Button "Why am I doing this? Because those dead were never found," Desbois, a Roman Catholic priest from Burgundy, said Tuesday on his first visit to Canada. "When people think of the Shoah, people think of what happened in western Europe - of Auschwitz, of the trains, of the gas chambers and the barbed wire," Desbois said, adding that things evolved differently in other parts of Europe. The 53-year-old priest was in Montreal to promote The Holocaust of Bullets, the new English-language translation of Porteur de memoires, his 2007 French-language investigative book about the hunt for unmarked mass graves in Ukraine. Desbois, 53, heads the French bishops' Commission for Relations with Judaism and consults with the Vatican on the Jewish religion. In 2004, he founded Yahad-In Unum ("together" in Hebrew and Latin), a Paris-based organization dedicated to identifying and documenting the killings. His interest stems from his grandfather, a French resistance member who was deported to Ukraine during the war and who told him that although conditions in his camp were bad, they were worse on the outside, where Jews were being systematically rounded up and shot. "There, the assassins were mobile, they moved from village to village - there were no deportations," Desbois said. "They surrounded the village in the morning, told the Jews they were taking them to Palestine, made them line up on the main street with their luggage." "They'd dug a pit at the end of the road or behind the church or behind the bank or wherever, and they walked them there, where the firing squads were waiting. They had one rule: 'One bullet, one Jew - one Jew, one bullet.' It was an order of the Wehrmacht to save on ammunition. The Jews were shot and, whether they were dead or not, they were pushed into the pit." Christian peasants who witnessed the killings and burials as children are still alive to tell the tale, making eyewitness corroboration of Jewish survivors' stories possible, he said. Thousands of German rifle cartridges at the sites offer further proof. "Every victim saw his killer, every killer saw his victim. It was a personal crime - no machine, no train, no camp, no gas, nothing. Only killing." Desbois's investigations are an inspiration to all people who want to stand up as witnesses to racism and genocide anywhere it occurs, said Alice Hershcovitz, director the Montreal Holocaust Memorial Centre, which invited Desbois to speak. "He's going back into the past to create a group of people who are standing up even now, children who were witnesses of a horror that they never spoke of before, and we would hope that all people will stand up when they see signs of prejudice around them," she said. So far in Ukraine, Desbois has done 820 video interviews with witnesses and has identified 850 sites of mass graves, most of them previously unknown. This year, the stocky energetic priest expanded his search into Belarus. In January, he'll begin interviewing witnesses in Russia, too, starting at sites around Smolensk and Krasnodar. To finance the new expeditions, his organization needs to triple its $800,000 annual budget. It has already raised 40 per cent - $650,000 - of the extra $1.6 million it needs this fiscal year, said the organization's director, Marco Gonzalez. Yahad-In Unum is funded by the Fondation pour la memoire de la Shoah, the European Commission, the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany and the Targum Shlishi Foundation, as well as the United States Holocaust Memorial Association. <*}}}>< <http://www.holypostage.com/>Holy Postage ~ Share your faith <*}}}>< <*}}}>< <http://www.flickr.com/groups/holypostage/>Holy Postage on <http://www.flickr.com/groups/holypostage/>Flickr <*}}}>< <*}}}>< <http://holypostage.mofuse.mobi/>Holy Postage on your Mobile <*}}}>< Holy Postage ~ Share your faith <http://holypostage.mofuse.mobi/> Lord, may everything we do begin with Your inspiration and continue with Your help, so that all our prayers and works may begin in You and by You be happily ended. We ask this through Christ our Lord. 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