"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.

Revolutionary Road

Revolutionary Road is a brilliant, riveting movie with an absolutely heartbreaking ending. I haven’t read the novel, but Sam Mendes’s take on it is a great film.

Kate Winslet and Leonardo DiCaprio’s performances as April and Frank Wheeler, a discontented young couple living in suburban Connecticut with their two children, are flawless. The unraveling of the Wheelers’ relationship is made tragic by the real love and passion they feel for each other, feelings only amplified by the realism of their bitter arguments and animosity. As April conveys in their last big blowout of the movie, love can too easily turn to hate, or loss of any feeling—on the surface—at all.

Michael Shannon as John, the mentally ill adult son of the Wheelers’ friend and real estate agent, Helen, played by Kathy Bates, is perfect as the voice of truth—truth inspiring and ugly—in the movie. A snide and angry sort of Greek chorus, he asks the questions no one will ask and makes the comments no one will make, a jarring foil to the suburban sleepiness all around the Wheelers.

My sympathies in the film lay with April. Frank is by turns no prize and wonderful, which is true of all of us, but while April is not perfect either—she does some terrible things of her own by the end of the film—Frank's contention that April needs a “shrink” because she does not want to have another baby—while he deals with his own emotional despair with a penchant for secretary screwing—is a particularly ugly piece of chauvinism. His dismissal of the Paris plan as unrealistic is weak, and John’s pointing out of that fact feels triumphant to watch. April probably does need therapy—of a twenty-first-century variety, not what she would probably have gotten in the shock-therapy-happy and abysmally gender-defined mid-1950s—but Frank’s reasoning for it is disgustingly insulting.

The lessons the film teaches are crucial: first, do not let your dreams die, for when they die, so do you, and you begin to kill everyone else. Frank’s boss tells him “you get one or two chances in life, and you’ve gotta grab them by the balls” after biting the morsel off his fork with a chomp like a big-nutted alligator, and, unfortunately, Frank is successfully manipulated by his mention of Frank’s salesman father and sees the promotion, rather than Paris, as that “chance.”

Lesson Two: do not let your dreams crush you. April falls victim to this.

And third: open yourself to love or you will die inside and take your marriage with you. Despite Frank’s faults, he is trying like hell to have a healthy relationship with April. While I sympathize with April when she tells him repeatedly to back off, this is because he is coming on so strong. We learn over the course of the movie that April’s refusal to talk about the issues right in front of their faces is what has led him to come on so strong. The morning after their last big fight is, in my mind, full of hope. For April, it is fraught with the same quiet desperation as before, but it does not have to be. She is doing the right things—she is taking an interest in Frank’s work and life, and he is blossoming under it before her eyes. If she would only see how much power she has, that one compliment from her can make Frank twice the man he was—for he adores her—they could pave a way to a real connection with or without a move away from suburbia. She feels powerless, but this is a tragic illusion.

The last scene is wonderfully symbolic as we listen to Bates’s Helen turn catty on the Wheelers and watch her husband turn down his hearing aid until he, and we, cannot hear her anymore. We now know how each of these tangential characters deals with their quiet desperation.

Grade: A+

Laura Ingalls Wilder Country – William Anderson

Something for Supper

Two summers ago my husband and I went on a weeklong trip to the Black Hills area of South Dakota. This spring, we moved from the Chicagoland area to a small town in Iowa. Something unexpected happened to me with both events: I fell in love with America. The great expanses, beautiful under the warm sun, brought me closer to nature than I’d been in years and showed me that the rural Midwest is truly the heart of the country. Where blue skies meet golden prairies or great stretches of green cornfields, wildflowers line the roads, and wildlife is easily sighted, peace of mind comes easily and fortitude seems to spontaneously spring within you.

I read Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House series as a child and loved it, and Laura Ingalls Wilder Country, William Anderson’s illustrated tour of the many places Wilder called home, reminds me just how central the sense of place—physical place—was to Wilder's life and is to her books. I'm glad I stumbled upon Anderson's book and bought it in South Dakota and finally recently read it after visiting one of the Ingalls family residences, the Masters Hotel in Burr Oak, Iowa.

Laura Ingalls Wilder Country brings together gorgeous modern photos by Leslie A. Kelly of the landscapes where Wilder lived in Wisconsin, Kansas, Minnesota, Iowa, South Dakota, and Missouri with photos of the exteriors and interiors of the Ingalls and Wilder homes, the families’ belongings, and the family members themselves. Pieced throughout are illustrations from the Little House books by Garth Williams—which brought warm memories rolling back to me—as well as first-edition Little House book illustrations by Helen Sewell and Mildred Boyle, along with artwork depicting the regions, including paintings by Wilder herself. Informative text and captions describe the Ingalls and Wilder families’ lives in each place. From the log cabin in the Big Woods to Laura and Almanzo’s beloved farmhouse in Missouri’s Ozark Mountain country, each home and landscape comes to life thanks to Anderson’s research, Kelly’s beautiful color photos, and the absolutely fascinating photos of the Ingalls family and objects such as Pa’s fiddle. Special sections on Laura and Almanzo’s daughter, Rose Wilder Lane; Almanzo’s family and his childhood near Malone, New York; and the lives of Laura’s parents and her sisters, Mary, Carrie, and Grace, beyond the Little House books round out the work.

Anderson’s book has inspired me to reread Wilder’s books, and I can’t wait to see them through my adult eyes.

Grade: A

The Prairie Is My Garden
Paintings by the fantastic Harvey Dunn (1884-1952), the renowned South Dakota artist, whose uncle Nate Dow actually married Grace Ingalls.

The Reader - Bernhard Schlink

German author Bernhard Schlink’s 1995 novel The Reader is a tour de force character study that weaves questions of guilt, truth, and evil together with spare, beautiful prose. In 1959, fifteen-year-old German schoolboy Michael Berg has a five-month affair with thirty-six-year-old streetcar conductor Hanna Schmitz, is abandoned by her, and encounters her again by chance seven years later in a courtroom, where he is observing a trial for a law school seminar—and she is being tried for a war crime.

A fast read, the text is full of striking images of eroticism, nature, and tenderness. Hanna is a strong physical presence, vividly described and by turns tender and physically abusive, and she proves to be just as strong an emotional presence for Michael after she is gone. Hanna strongly contrasts Michael, who is cerebral, analytical, and vulnerable to her strength of personality, yet she herself is a walking contradiction. Her tenderness is paired with coldness; her strength is paired with her own remarkable vulnerability; her care for him upon their first meeting, when he vomits in the street at the start of a case of hepatitis, is sudden, brusque, “almost an assault,” yet she embraces him when he cries. She primarily calls Michael “Kid,” and she often plays a mothering role in their encounters, bathing being the introduction and coda of their affair, but this tenderness does not change the fact that she is molesting a fifteen-year-old boy. Most troubling is Hanna’s strange combination of strength and weakness.

Michael learns during the trial that Hanna was an SS guard at Auschwitz and another concentration camp during the war and that during a journey to move many women prisoners, a church holding the prisoners had caught fire during a bombing, and Hanna and the other guards had left the church locked while it burned. Hanna explains that she did this because she and the few other guards present would not have been able to control the prisoners when they flooded out of the fire: “We couldn’t just let them escape!” Her explanations destroy her case.

Accountability and decision-making seem foreign to Hanna. She is an example of Hannah Arendt’s “banality of evil,” and, though a strong presence, she is ultimately weak because she drifts from one situation to another as if she has no choice in the matter—and yet we know, once we know her personal secret, which I will not reveal, that she did have another choice; but she dismissed it out of pride. At the age of twenty-one, she voluntarily joined the SS after being offered a job as a foreman at Siemens, the factory at which she worked. For Hanna, hiding her secret comes above making moral decisions. When questioned about her involvement in selecting prisoners in the camps to be put to death, she asks the judge, not in defiance, but in earnest, “I … I mean … so what would you have done?” Further along in this questioning, she asks aloud, “So should I have … should I have not … should I not have signed up at Siemens?” When questioned about her decision not to unlock the church doors, she again asks the judge, “What would you have done?” There is a strange virtue in her honestly seeking right answers to what she should have done. But it is disturbing that these questions are only coming now, years after the horrific facts.

Hanna remains a mystery throughout the novel, and her actions always leave Michael alone to pick up the pieces, first when she leaves town without an explanation, then at the end of the trial, and again at the end of her life. Yet her apparent cruelty is tempered with the true affection she felt for Michael after they parted and her desire to learn as much as possible about the Holocaust and its victims, both evidenced by the possessions in her prison cell. Further, she claims to be haunted nightly by the ghosts of her past. The puzzle of The Reader is whether Hanna is a monster or a sympathetic character. This question bonds us to our narrator, Michael, who spends most of his life enduring the same conflict, consciously and subconsciously.

Schlink's novel is gorgeous and haunting long after one finishes.

Grade: A

New York Minute

This movie cruises along the Avenue of Dumbness for the first hour and ten minutes or so, and then it suddenly becomes entertaining during the House of Bling scene, in which Ashley and Mary-Kate Olsen, as hapless twins in the city Jane and Roxy Ryan, are given makeovers by a group of over-the-top urban stylists. Roxy calms her panicking sister down by throwing a glass of water in her face, and Jane’s answer, “Thank you. I wasn’t thirsty,” had me laughing my ass off on the couch. The hair salon antics from then on (despite the pretty dumb makeovers themselves) are genuinely funny, and the movie from then on is genuinely entertaining--for the last twenty minutes.

The plot is this: Jane and Roxy are opposites—Jane the uptight scholar, Roxy the rocker chick class-cutter. The girls wind up in New York on the same day when Jane travels downtown to give the speech of her life in a competition for an Oxford fellowship and Roxy heads to the city too to take part in a Simple Plan video shoot and promote her band. Meanwhile, Roxy is being chased by a gung-ho truant officer played amusingly (despite the bad writing) by Eugene Levy. Disasters strike and the hostile sisters must work together to get through the day.

Soon after the House of Bling, another shock arrives in the form of a surprisingly affecting dramatic scene between the Olsens. I even found myself tearing up a little as the twins fought with tears in their eyes. Where did that scene come from?

After that, Andy Richter’s character, the very white “first adopted son” of Ma Bang, a Chinese dealer of pirated movies and music, becomes genuinely funny with his affected Chinese accent, whereas earlier in the movie the character was just … you guessed it, dumb (no matter how much I wanted to find him funny). Who turned the switch? Add to that a very funny scene between Levy and a pair of tourists from Minnesota, and another funny scene involving said tourists at the fellowship competition.

In the end, this movie may have just enough heart to earn it “So bad it’s good” status down the road. The puzzling presence of truly entertaining actors such as Levy, Richter, Darrel Hammond, and Andrea Martin (and an inspired “Wink wink” moment with Bob Saget) helps.

Grade: C-