Why am I doing this? Because those dead were never found

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.

Rev. Patrick Desbois has made it his life 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.

"Why am I doing this? Because those dead were never found," Desbois, a Roman Catholic priest from Burgundy, said yesterday 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 all that is true, but they don't know is that in the east there was none of that."

The priest is in town to promote The Holocaust of Bullets, the new English-language translation of Porteur de mémoires, his 2007 French-language investigative book about the hunt for unmarked mass graves in Ukraine.

Desbois, 53, heads the Commission for Relations with Judaism of the French Bishops' Conference 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," he said.

"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.' "

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 those who want to stand up as witnesses to racism and genocide, said Alice Hershcovitz, director the Montreal Holocaust Memorial Centre, which invited Desbois here to speak.

So far in Ukraine, Desbois has identified 850 sites of mass graves, most of them previously unknown. This year, the stocky energetic priest expanded his search into Belarus.

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 le mémoire 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. It has no sponsors based in Germany, a situation Desbois deplores.

"I think it's a question of family mythology," he said. "I've never met a (German) family whose grandfather told them he killed Jews. It's as if there was a genocide, but no one was guilty."

Patrick Desbois speaks tonight at 7:30 at the Imperial Cinema, 1430 Bleury St. The free lecture and slideshow is hosted by the Montreal Holocaust Memorial Centre to launch its 11th annual Holocaust Education Series, which ends Nov. 16. For information, call 514-345-2605.

© The Gazette (Montreal) 2008