"Crying out to me from the ground": Father Patrick Desbois on the Search for Mass Graves of the Holocaust -- St. Ambrose University, Davenport 8/27/09

Look out your window and imagine armed men entering the home across your street, dragging the family out, lining them up, and marching them away at gunpoint. Imagine this happening up and down your street, the people--men, women, and children--lined in rows of five and marched away. You rush outside to get a closer view of what is happening. Women--mothers you know personally--carry their infants. You hear gunshots: some people have refused to leave their homes and they have been shot dead inside them. Everyone else you know in town--everyone who has not been led away--has streamed out of their own homes as well and you all follow the soldiers and your defenseless neighbors. The armed men bark orders at your neighbors and smile and joke with each other and generally act like people bored on the job. The march stops at a pit near the woods outside of town. Your neighbors, who have been ordered to give up their heavy winter clothing, or even forced to strip naked, are ordered to line up along the edge of a newly dug pit. Soldiers and hired men, some cold and detached, some drunk, raise their guns and shoot your neighbors in their heads. Your neighbors fall into the pit. Some of them, anyway. Some of the shooters missed. Those missed targets--men, women, and children--are pushed by other soldiers and hired men into the pit. They will be buried alive by their neighbors. Your neighbors. Buried alive.

By the end of the day, nearly every family on your street is in that pit. Every home on every street for blocks around is vacant. All of those families are in that pit. Your town's population has shrunk by one thousand or four thousand or ten thousand--or even more. Those thousands are dead--or still dying. That pit, dug half a mile from your home, by trees and views you have known all your life, is moving. It won't stop moving for three days.


Last night I attended a talk at St. Ambrose University in Davenport, Iowa, by French Roman Catholic priest Father Patrick Desbois, whose work to find the mass graves of Jews shot to death in Eastern Europe is described in his book, "The Holocaust by Bullets: A Priest's Journey to Uncover the Truth Behind the Murder of 1.5 Million Jews."

The mass murder of Europe's Jews and Gypsies was not only carried out in the death camps. One and a half million Jews, along with Roma, Polish intelligentsia, Soviet political commissars, and Communist Party members, were killed throughout Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union by pistol or machine gun by special German paramilitary groups called the Einsatzgruppen and local volunteers between 1939 and 1944 (the majority occurring between 1941 and 1944). I learned about the killings in Dr. Werner Braatz's excellent courses on the Third Reich and the Holocaust years ago when I was a student at UW-Oshkosh (I highly recommend reading Christopher R. Browning's Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland on the topic), but I didn't realize until recently that few people in the general public know anything about this chapter of the war. Given that fact along with the honorable nature of Father Desbois's work, it was a privilege to have the chance to hear him speak.

Father Desbois described how the killings were done, how he seeks out the graves, and how he is received by witnesses. He answered questions from the audience after his lecture. The event was eye-opening.

After the massacres, the pits were covered with dirt and left unmarked. The residents of the villages in which these murders took place, most of whom are poor people who have never left their hometowns, witnessed the killings as children and now are being asked their stories for the first time. Father Desbois and his ten-person team are working against time, as these witnesses are dying of old age.

Father Desbois is also working against denial. The mayor of Rava-Ruska in western Ukraine denied over and over to Desbois any knowledge of a massacre in the city. That mayor's eventual replacement brought Desbois the truth that everyone in the village knew. Now Desbois goes straight to the average people as they walk down the street, conducting their everyday lives.

He has met a woman who was compelled by the Germans as a young girl to climb a tree--a tree the woman could see from where she stood during the interview--to retrieve the body parts of a woman blown apart in a pit by grenades, which the Germans had thrown in after the shooting to kill survivors.

Rarely, survivors managed to crawl out of the pits at night. Some are now witnesses.

Father Desbois and his team have interviewed over a thousand witnesses, covering half of Ukraine. They have just begun work in Belarus. They have yet to begin in Russia. Unfortunately, they likely only have a six- or seven-year window in which to collect these testimonies before the witnesses are all gone. The memories of the villagers, forensic evidence collected at the sites that the villagers help the team locate, and the endless job of reviewing German and Soviet government archives--the pages of which number in the millions, according to Desbois--are what make it possible for the grave sites to finally be marked, nearly seventy years later.

Unfortunately and frighteningly, Desbois and his team have been witnesses to anti-Semitism, alive and well. They interviewed a family at their home on Christmas Day and, as part of the family's celebration, watched the performance of a Christmas play. The nativity portion, said Desbois, was lovely. Then came the arrival of Jewish characters, portrayed as evil, thieving hoarders--caricatures that could have been pulled straight from Nazi propaganda but have existed for centuries longer.

This sort of dehumanization has been appallingly effective throughout history, of course. Desbois, discussing the fact that it was legal to kill Jews in Eastern Europe during World War II and that villagers turned in their Jewish neighbors to the Germans for money, shared the worst example he knows of this kind of trade: a woman whose daughter had married a Jewish man took advantage of her daughter's absence one day and turned in her six grandchildren to be shot.

Apart from the village raid graves already described, there are more mysteries to be solved: Desbois spoke last night of the fact that the Germans did not kill all the Jews in the villages; they kept some alive to work for them. This included a group of girls kept as sexual slaves. At the end of the war, these young women, pregnant, were shot. Desbois asked last night, "Where is their grave?"

The Rogalski Center at St. Ambrose was, thankfully, full. In a world where Holocaust deniers do not seem to be going anywhere and hold frightening positions of power--Iran's President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad--and in which one still hears things like "He jewed him down on the price" thrown around casually, Desbois's work is extremely important. Desbois, who is an advisor to the Vatican on Jewish relations and whose life's work has been confronting anti-Semitism, discussed why he is drawn to the task of finding these graves. He spoke of the story of Cain and Abel, specifically the Bible passage in which Cain denies knowing his slain brother's whereabouts, famously asking, "Am I my brother's keeper?" Desbois quoted God's answer: "Listen! Your brother's blood is crying out to me from the ground."

Donations can be made to Father Desbois' nonprofit organization, Yahad-In Unum, which searches for and documents the mass execution sites of Jews in Ukraine and Belarus, here. All profits from his book, Holocaust by Bullets, also go to Yahad-In Unum. The organization is also looking for a college senior or graduate student with excellent writing skills to work for Yahad-In Unum as a telecommuting intern. More information can be found here. Go to www.holocaustbybullets.com for more information on Desbois's work.