Holocaust by bullets
March 12, 2009 · No Comments

Father Patrick Desbois, a French diocesan priest, is doing remarkable work looking for the sites of mass burial of murdered Jews in Ukraine and Belarus. He and his team of eight helpers have found nearly a thousand mass graves. It is described in his remarkable book Holocaust by Bullets and in an exhibition at the Museum of Jewish Heritage in New York.

Fr DesboisThe podcast interview with Fr. Desbois, available on the Museum site, is not easy listening, but it’s made easier by his calm telling of dreadful stories. He has interviewed hundreds of witnesses, many of them very old people, and compared their stories to official records. It ...

Holocaust by bullets
March 12, 2009 · No Comments

Father Patrick Desbois, a French diocesan priest, is doing remarkable work looking for the sites of mass burial of murdered Jews in Ukraine and Belarus. He and his team of eight helpers have found nearly a thousand mass graves. It is described in his remarkable book Holocaust by Bullets and in an exhibition at the Museum of Jewish Heritage in New York.

Fr DesboisThe podcast interview with Fr. Desbois, available on the Museum site, is not easy listening, but it’s made easier by his calm telling of dreadful stories. He has interviewed hundreds of witnesses, many of them very old people, and compared their stories to official records. It helps that he is a priest; his first contact in any village is through the local (Catholic, Eastern Rite or Orthodox) clergy.

Barbed wire fences and watchtowers around concentration camps are what comes to mind when we think of the Holocaust. Millions of Jews, gypsies and other people were slaughtered in such places, but much less attention has been given to the millions slaughtered by SS Special Units, whose sole job was the killing of Jews in Central and Eastern Europe. Helped by the German Army’s road blocks, the SS shot about 1.5 million Jews in small towns, villages and forests from the steppe to the Crimea. They did not want to waste ammunition, so their motto was “One Jew, one bullet”. Some spent every day of the war killing Jews.

Father Desbois, who has been missioned by the French bishops, is doing remarkable work as he recovers the stories of those who were meant to be forgotten.