Fading Shadows of Holocaust in Ukraine

A testament to the enduring difference between man and the beast: a thirst for justice and an unquenchable desire to expose the inhuman behavior of others.

Priest in quest to bring Holocaust criminals to book - Profile
ENI-09-0557

By Judith Sudilovsky
Jerusalem, 17 July (ENI)--When the Rev. Patrick Desbois heard that German prosecutors had formally charged 89-year-old Ukranian-born John Demjanjuk with being an accessory to murder at a Nazi death camp in Poland during the Second World War, he would have been reminded that time is short to bring to justice those who were responsible for the Holocaust and are still alive.

He is charged with almost 28 000 counts of involvement in killings of inmates many of whom were Jewish civilians.

Desbois, a 54-year-old French Roman Catholic priest, has dedicated the last six years of his life to preserving a record of the mass killings that took place in Ukraine during the Holocaust, and has interviewed ageing Ukrainian villagers, who were children at the time of the murders. These last witnesses are dying off, and it is a race against time to record their eye-witness accounts, the priest says.

"This is not a long-term project," Desbois told Ecumenical News International. "The witnesses are so old. In six or seven years, it will be over."

On 13 July, State prosecutors in Munich alleged that Demjanjuk was a Nazi war criminal. He faces 27 900 counts of complicity to murder in a 1943 wartime massacre, and is also accused of being a guard at the Sobibor death camp in occupied Poland, where the killings took place. In May 2009, the United States deported Demjanjuk to Germany; he had been living in the U.S. for many years.

The Ukrainian says he is a victim of mistaken identity, and has spent five years battling against attempts to bring him to trial.

Fr Desbois is the son of a staunchly secular family, who had been active in the French Resistance, and the grandson of a French Second World War veteran. Desbois was intrigued by his grandfather's stories about his own imprisonment, when he was a soldier, in the Ukraine's Rava-Ruska Nazi prison camp.

Though it was bad for the soldiers, his grandfather told him, it was worse for "the others on the outside". Since then, says Desbois, he has wanted to know about "the others".

Talking to ENI during a visit to Israel, he said his search had been an answer to God's question to Cain, as recorded in the Bible: "Where is your brother Abel?"

"Since I was a child, I have been asking this question: 'Where is my Jewish brother?'" said Desbois. "I think we cannot build a modern world on the silence of Abel."

His main goal when he undertook the project was to "establish the truth" of what had happened, he said.

The late French Cardinal Jean-Marie Lustiger, whose own mother perished in Auschwitz, has supported Desbois' work; Pope Benedict XVI has also praised it. With the encouragement of the cardinal and Israel Singer of the World Jewish Congress, and with financial support from the French Foundation for the Memory of the Shoah, Desbois established Yahad-In Unum (from the Hebrew and Latin words meaning "Together") in 2004 to support his work in the Ukraine.

Desbois says that as a young man he shocked his family when he decided to join the priesthood following three months of volunteer work with Mother Teresa in Calcutta, India.

Later, and already a priest, it became painfully apparent to him that a group he was leading on a Catholic pilgrimage to Poland knew little about the Holocaust. He began studying Judaism to counter this ignorance, and took part in a series of seminars on the Holocaust at Jerusalem's Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial. He also spent time in Israel learning Hebrew.

Desbois began organizing Catholic Holocaust study tours to Auschwitz and other Nazi concentration camps in 1997.

Only when he began interviewing the Ukrainian villagers did he realise that the slayings in that country had taken place quite publicly. He says that the witnesses spoke very directly about the events, as if they had been waiting to tell someone their story. He has also gathered testimony about the location of the mass grave of Gypsies whom, like the Jews, the Nazis also targeted for elimination. The Nazis murdered an estimated 200 000 to 500 000 Gypsies.

Yad Vashem spokesperson Iris Rosenberg said the Holocaust memorial, "recognised the moral and social significance of the father's community-based field activity in rural Ukraine", which, she added, provided a "valuable insight into the Holocaust in the Ukraine".

To date, Father Desbois' team has interviewed around 1000 witnesses and located 800 previously unknown mass graves. Desbois works with local and international Jewish burial groups to reinter bones found in the graves, in  line with Jewish tradition.

He says that local Ukrainian priests, who are largely from the Orthodox Church, have been very cooperative, and their support has encouraged the villagers to speak to him. In addition, he believes the non-judgemental way in which he seeks to interview people also helps them open up and tell him their stories. Desbois says he only asks one thing, "What happened?"

He asks about specific details: where the Nazis stood; what colour were their cars; from what direction they came.

"If you saw 10 000 people being killed, you would remember," Desbois says.

The work, he explains, is "very difficult", and listening to the minute details of the testimony, including stories of children being tossed into the mass grave alive after their parents had been shot, and young villagers being forced to walk on the corpses to pack them down to allow more room for another group of Jews to be killed and thrown in, can be emotionally draining and depressing.

"There are a lot of private stories, about small children killed," he said. "It is most depressing but if we do not do it, who will do it?" [Copyright, ENI, reprinted with permission]