Father Patrick Desbois is a French Catholic priest who, virtually single-handedly, has undertaken the task of excavating the history of previously undocumented Jewish victims of the Holocaust in the former Soviet Union, including an estimated 1.5 million people who were murdered in Ukraine. Father Desbois was born 10 years after the end of World War II -- and yet, through his tireless actions, he exemplifies the "righteous gentile." The term is generally used to recognize non-Jews who, during the Holocaust, risked their lives to save Jews from the Nazis. Father Desbois is a generation too late to save lives. Instead, he has saved memory and history.

How much he has accomplished since 2002 can be seen in "The Shooting of Jews in Ukraine: Holocaust By Bullets," which runs until March 15 at the Museum of Jewish Heritage in New York. The exhibit was created by the Memorial de la Shoah Paris in cooperation with Father Desbois's organization, Yahad in Unum (the words for "together" in Hebrew and Latin). It follows the publication last August of his book "Holocaust By Bullets" (Palgrave MacMillan).

Using forensic evidence, eyewitness accounts and archival research, Father Desbois has taken it upon himself to document the murders of Jews after the Nazis invaded the former Soviet Union. In Ukraine, where he has begun his work, these Jews were not killed in the relatively well-documented machinery of the death camps. They were the victims of mobile killing units that shot their captives and deliberately left few records of their crimes. At each location, according to Father Desbois, local Ukrainians, including hundreds of children, were requisitioned at gunpoint to assist with the logistics of murder. In August 1941, for instance, these death squads were killing an estimated 82 Jews every hour.

The exhibit is excruciating, and encompasses videos of eyewitness testimony as well as step-by-step descriptions of the executions. From the forced preparation of the grave sites through the painstaking pre-execution activities (like the forcible removal of the Jews' jewelry and gold teeth), the firing squads and the aftermath (including the Nazi banquets celebrating a job well done), the exhibit documents the Holocaust in a part of the world where the specifics of murder, and the location of specific sites, were previously omitted from the historical record. At one point, it describes the technique pioneered by Nazi Einsatzgruppen Leader Friedrich Jeckeln in 1941 of positioning the victims-to-be face down on top of those who had just been executed. Jeckeln called this method Sardinenpackung, or sardine-packing, and noted its purpose: "to avoid having to rearrange the bodies and to gain space."

In one corner of the exhibit, a haunting series of recently discovered photographs taken by the German photographer Johannes Hahle flash by without commentary: They are pictures of the Jews of Lubny, being assembled for execution. The photographs are brutal in their simplicity. Men, women and children wait, in a vast field, for what might be minutes or hours. Adults stare into space; impatient children cry. Over the course of the photographic series, the pile of collected clothing behind them slowly grows bigger, in a grim parallel to the growing number of ended lives.

Father Desbois's French grandfather was imprisoned in a forced-labor camp in Rawa Ruska in the Ukraine during the war with 25,000 other French soldiers captured by the Germans. This initially motivated the priest to travel to the region and learn more about all of the Nazis' victims.

In 2004, Father Desbois founded Yahad in Unum, along with French Cardinal Jean-Marie Lustiger and Rabbi Israel Singer. It was created with two goals: to support dialogue between Jewish and Catholic authorities, and, in the words of a founding statement, to reply "to issues of the world with common projects founded on the ethic inspired by the gift of the law on Mount Sinai."

Father Desbois is tired, as the circles beneath his eyes attest, but he wants to learn more. In 2009, he and his team will expand their work into Belarus and Ossetia. He hopes people will contact him through his organization's Web site, yahadinunum.org, and tell him where to look for more mass graves and more eyewitnesses to history.

"These were young children who were forced, in the course of one day, to fill the grave and to witness," Father Desbois said. "They heard the last words of the dead. They want to speak."

Time is working against the priest, who accompanies researchers on most of their trips into the former Soviet Union and has, to this point, personally interviewed 823 witnesses. Each interview takes up to two hours, and his team takes 10 to 15 trips a year to the region, each lasting no more than 17 days because, he explains, "We can't bear more, psychologically." But the surviving witnesses, most of whom were children at the time of the massacres, are already in their late 70s and early 80s, and Father Desbois worries that they won't be able to tell their stories for much longer.

But this project that has become his life's work, he says, is inspired by two sources far greater than either history or circumstance. One is "min hashamayim," Father Desbois says in Hebrew -- from heaven, which inspires us to build relationships with our fellow human beings. The other inspiration, he explains, comes from the earthly world, and what is written in Genesis about the blood of Abel, murdered by Cain: "The voice of your brother's blood is crying to me from the ground."

As the unmarked mass graves are slowly located, one by one, and sanctified with the recitation of the Kaddish, the Jewish prayer of mourning for the dead, the cries can at last be silenced. Are we our brothers' keepers? To Father Desbois, the answer is a resounding "Yes."

Even so, I ask him: How can you bear to listen to a woman talk about when she was 14 years old and was forced to walk on corpses, between shootings, in order to pack them down in a mass grave? "I keep my faith in God," Father Desbois responds, "not in humanity."

Ms. Horn is a lawyer and writer at work on her first novel.

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