Revealed – a forgotten Holocaust

Published on Sunday 1 February 2009 21:16

FATHER Desbois, a short, soft-spoken man with dark, thinning hair, says the stories give him nightmares.

A French Catholic priest who interviewed more than 800 eyewitnesses and pinpointed hundreds of mass graves strewn around dusty fields in the former Soviet Union, he has now told the story of more than two million Jews gunned down in towns and villages across Ukraine, Belarus and Russia.

The place these killings occupied in the Nazis' Final Solution has been under-researched – until now.

For seven years, Patrick Desbois gathered material for his new book, The Holocaust by Bullets. It tells how 1.4 million of Soviet Ukraine's 2.4 million Jews were executed, starved to death or died of disease during the war. Another 550,000-650,000 Soviet Jews were killed in Belarus and up to 140,000 in Russia. Most of the victims were women, children and the elderly.

Begun after Germany invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941, the slaughter was the opening phase of what became the Final Solution, with its factories of death operating in Auschwitz and other camps, all in Nazi-occupied Poland.

Sometimes bursting into tears, old men and women recount to Father Desbois how women, children and elders were marched or carted in from neighbouring towns to be shot, burned to death or buried alive by German troops, Romanian forces, squads of Ukrainian collaborators and local ethnic German volunteers.

Among his key findings is the widespread use of local children to help bury the dead, wait on the German soldiers during meals and remove gold teeth and other valuables from the bodies.

The witnesses are mostly Orthodox Christian, and Father Desbois comes to them as a priest, dressed in black and wearing a clerical collar. Many have never before talked about their experiences. In the village of Ternivka, 200 miles south of Kiev where 2,300 Jews were killed, a frail, elderly woman, who identified herself only as Petrivna, revealed the unbearable task the Nazis imposed on her. The young schoolgirl saw her Jewish neighbours thrown into a large pit, many still alive and convulsing in agony. Her task was to trample on them barefoot to make space for more. One of those she had to tread on was a classmate.

"You know, we were very poor, we didn't have shoes," Petrivna told Father Desbois. "You see, it is not easy to walk on bodies."

Father Desbois' small team includes a translator, a researcher, a mapping expert, a ballistics specialist and a video and photo crew. The priest has deep personal roots in his project, dating to 2002, when he first visited Ukraine to see the place where his grandfather was interned as a French prisoner in the First World War. When he arrived, the locals told him of a stream of blood that had run from the site where the Jews were executed.

"I am in a hurry to find all the bones, to establish the truth and justice so that the world can know what happened and that the Germans never left a tiny village in Ukraine, Belarus and Russia without killing Jews there," he said.

Anatoly Podolsky, head of the Ukrainian Centre for Holocaust Studies, said: "As a Ukrainian citizen and a Ukrainian historian it pains me that there is no policy of national remembrance. We are not responsible for the past, but we are responsible for remembering."