Re: [Cz-L] new york times on A Priest Methodically Reveals Ukrainian Jews’ Fate

Below I have copied an article from today's New York Times that may be of =
 
interest in this discussion. This link might not work for everyone, as it m=
ay
require a New York Times Select subscription:
_http://select.nytimes.com/mem/tnt.html?tntget=2007/10/06/world/europe/06=
pries
t.html&tntemail0=y&emc=tnt&pagewanted=all_
(http://select.nytimes.com/mem/tnt.html?tntget=2007/10/06/world/europe/06=
priest.html&tntemail0=y&emc=tnt&pagewant
ed=all) :

Eytan Fichman

The Saturday Profile
A Priest Methodically Reveals Ukrainian Jews’ Fate

Efrem Lukatsky/Associated Press
Over four years, the Rev. Patrick Desbois and his group have identified mo=
re
than 600 common graves of Jews in Ukraine.

By ELAINE SCIOLINO
Published: October 6, 2007
PARIS, Oct. 4 — His subjects were mostly children and teenagers at =
the time,
terrified witnesses to mass slaughter. Some were forced to work at the
bottom rung of the Nazi killing machine — as diggers of mass graves=
, cooks who fed
Nazi soldiers and seamstresses who mended clothes stripped from the Jews =
 
before execution.

Witness to Genocide (memorialdelashoah.org)

"I cannot react to the horrors that pour out. If I react, the stories will=
 
stop."
The Rev. Patrick Desbois

In a World War II photograph, a member of a Nazi SS paramilitary group
prepared to execute a Ukrainian Jew, one of 1.5 million put to death durin=
g the
war.
They live today in rural poverty, many without running water or heat,
nearing the end of their lives. So Patrick Desbois has been quietly seekin=
g them
out, roaming the back roads and forgotten fields of Ukraine, hearing their=
 
stories and searching for the unmarked common graves. He knows that they a=
re an
unparalleled source to document the murder of the 1.5 million Jews of Ukra=
ine,
shot dead and buried throughout the country.
He is neither a historian nor an archaeologist, but a French Roman Catholi=
c
priest. And his most powerful tools are his matter-of-fact style —=
 and his
clerical collar.
The Nazis killed nearly 1.5 million Jews in Ukraine after their invasion o=
f
the Soviet Union in June 1941. But with few exceptions, most notably the 1=
941
slaughter of nearly 34,000 Jews in the Babi Yar ravine in Kiev, much of th=
at
history has gone untold.
Knocking on doors, unannounced, Father Desbois, 52, seeks to unlock the
memories of Ukrainian villagers the way he might take confessions one by o=
ne in
church.
“At first, sometimes, people don’t believe I’m a p=
riest,” said Father
Desbois in an interview this week. “I have to use simple words and=
 listen to
these horrors — without any judgment. I cannot react to the horror=
s that pour
out. If I react, the stories will stop.”
Over four years, Father Desbois has videotaped more than 700 interviews wi=
th
witnesses and bystanders and has identified more than 600 common graves of=
 
Jews, most of them previously unknown. He also has gathered material evide=
nce
of the execution of Jews from 1941 to 1944, the “Holocaust of bulle=
ts” as it
is called.
Often his subjects ask Father Desbois to stay for a meal and to pray, as i=
f
to somehow bless their acts of remembrance. He does not judge those who we=
re
assigned to carry out tasks for the Nazis, and Holocaust scholars say that=
 is
one reason he is so effective.
“If a Jewish taker-of-testimony comes, what would people think �=
�� that this
is someone coming to accuse,” said Paul Shapiro, director of the C=
enter for
Advanced Holocaust Studies at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum =
in
Washington. “When a priest comes, people open up. He brings to the=
 subject a
kind of legitimacy, a sense that it’s O.K. to talk about the past.=
 There’s
absolution through confession.”
Unlike in Poland and Germany, where the Holocaust remains visible through=
 
the searing symbols of the extermination camps, the horror in Ukraine was=
 
hidden away, first by the Nazis, then by the Soviets.
“There was nothing to see in Ukraine because people were shot to d=
eath with
guns,” said Thomas Eymond-Laritaz, president of the Victor Pinchuk=
 
Foundation, Ukraine’s largest philanthropic organization. �=
�That’s why Father Desbois
is so important.”
The foundation helped underwrite a conference on the subject at the Sorbon=
ne
this week — the first to bring together Western and Ukrainian scho=
lars —
and has begun contributing funds to Father Desbois’s project.
Some of the results of Father Desbois’s research — includi=
ng video
interviews, wartime documents, photographs of newly uncovered mass graves,=
 rusty
bullets and shell casings and personal possessions of the victims �=
� are on
display for the first time at an exhibit at the Memorial of the Shoah in t=
he Marais
district of Paris.
The exhibit shows, for example, images of the 15 mass graves of several
thousand Jews in a commune called Busk that Father Desbois and his team
discovered and began excavating after interviewing several witnesses. Amon=
g hundreds
of other items on display is a black-and-white photo from 1942 that shows =
a
German police officer shooting naked Jewish women lying in a ravine in the=
 
Rivne region.
Traveling with a team that includes two interpreters, a photographer, a
cameraman, a ballistics specialist, a mapping expert and a notetaker, Fathe=
r
Desbois records all the stories on video, sometimes holding the microphone =
 
himself, and asking questions in simple language and a flat tone.
In Buchach in 2005, Regina Skora told Father Desbois that as a young girl=
 
she witnessed executions.
“Did the people know they were going to be killed?” Father =
 Desbois asked
her.
“Yes.”
“How did they react?”
“They just walked, that’s all. If someone couldn’t=
 walk, they told him to
lie on the ground and shot him in the back of the neck.”
Vera Filonok said she was 16 when she watched from the porch of her mud hu=
t
in Konstantinovka in 1941 as thousands of Jews were shot, thrown into a pi=
t
and set on fire. Those who were still alive writhed “like flies an=
d worms,”
she said.
There are stories of how the Nazis drummed on empty buckets to avoid havin=
g
to listen to the screams of their victims, how Jewish women were made sex=
 
slaves of the Nazis and then executed. One witness said that as a 6-year-o=
ld he
hid and watched as his best friend was shot to death.
Other witnesses described how the Nazis were allowed only one bullet to th=
e
back per victim and that the Jews sometimes were buried alive. “On=
e witness
told of how the pit moved for three days, how it breathed,” Father =
 Desbois
recalled.
Father Desbois became haunted by the history of the Nazis in Ukraine as a=
 
child growing up on the family farm in the Bresse region of eastern France=
. His
paternal grandfather, who was deported to a prison camp for French soldier=
s
in Rava-Ruska, on the Ukrainian side of the Polish border, told the family=
 
nothing about the experience. But he confessed to his relentlessly curious=
 
grandson, “For us it was bad, for ‘others’ it was w=
orse.”
There were other family links to the German occupation of France. One
maternal cousin who carried letters for French resisters perished in a Naz=
i
concentration camp. Father Desbois’s mother told him only recently=
 that the family
hid dozens of resisters on the farm.
After teaching mathematics as a French government employee in West Africa=
 
and working in Calcutta for three months with Mother Teresa, he joined the=
 
priesthood. His secular family was horrified.
He started as a parish priest, studying Judaism and learning Hebrew during=
 a
stint in Israel. He asked to work with Gypsies, ex-prisoners or Jews, and=
 
was appointed as a bridge to France’s Jewish community.
It was on a tour with a group in 2002 that, visiting Rava-Ruska, he asked=
 
the mayor where the Jews were buried. The mayor said he did not know.
“I knew that 10,000 Jews had been killed there, so it was impossib=
le that he
didn’t know,” Father Desbois recalled.
The following year, a new mayor took the priest to a forest where about 10=
0
villagers had gathered in a semicircle, waiting to tell their stories and =
to
help uncover the graves buried beneath their feet.
He met other mayors and parish priests who helped find more witnesses. In=
 
2004, Father Desbois created Yahad-In Unum, an organization devoted to
Christian-Jewish understanding run from a tiny office in a working-class n=
eighborhood
in northeastern Paris, backed and largely financed by a Holocaust foundati=
on
in France and the Catholic Church.
To verify witnesses’ testimony, Father Desbois relies heavily on a =
 huge
archive of Soviet-era documents housed in the Holocaust museum in Washingt=
on, as
well as German trial archives. He registers an execution or a grave site o=
nly
after obtaining three independent accounts from witnesses.
Only one-third of Ukrainian territory has been covered so far, and it will=
 
take several more years to finish the research. A notice at the exit of th=
e
Paris exhibit asks that any visitor with information about victims of Nazi =
 
atrocities in Ukraine leave a note or send an e-mail message.
“People talk as if these things happened yesterday, as if 60 years=
 didn’t
exist,” Father Desbois said. “Some ask, ‘Why are y=
ou coming so late? We have
been waiting for you.’”

In a message dated 10/5/2007 4:17:19 P.M. Eastern Daylight Time,
mirtaylo_at_indiana.edu writes:
Please excuse my being such a Schlemiel.
I now printed and magnified Dr. Bursuk's letter and can read it better.

Correction:

> This old cemetery was established more than 800 years ago
Should be 200 years ago.

More of the letter:

____________
It has been said that they will do no more reconstruction.
So what can we do with the gravestones?
If they are at the cemetery, they will not be stolen.

Now there are no developments with the Jewish problem.
Nothing is being broken at the Jewish cemetery.
The authorities have started to put things in order.
They do very little, but still something.

Thank you (plural) for remembering us.
More than I write you, no one will tell you.
________________

Let's see what Marianne, Leo and Florence will discover.
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Received on 2007-10-06 05:38:33