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But there was also a “holocaust by bullets,” the systematic extermination of Jews and Gypsies by special teams that went from village to village in Nazi-occupied Eastern Europe from June 1941 until late 1944, rounding up victims, shooting them and dumping their bodies into mass graves.
Locating and documenting all those mass graves and — as far as possible — documenting the names of the estimated 1.5 million Jews who are buried in them has been the work of a French priest, Fr. Patrick Desbois, for the past 12 years now.
And knowing all about this other form of holocaust is important not only to the descendants and relatives of the victims, but because it became the model for the political and “ethnic cleansing” massacres that have been carried out into our own time — in Cambodia, Rwanda and Bosnia-Herzegovina, for example.
“Nobody has built a new Auschwitz,” Fr. Desbois said.
Fr. Desbois will talk about his findings and what he believes to be their significance when he addresses the Holocaust Memorial Center’s 28th Anniversary Dinner in Southfield on Nov. 11.
It was his grandfather’s stories about having witnessed such an incident in the Nazi-occupied Ukraine that prompted Fr. Desbois to want to investigate what had happened, and the fall of communism made it possible to access archives and visit actual sites in a way that had previously been impossible.
His grandfather had been deported by the Nazis from France for political reasons, and so was among the residents of a Ukrainian village when one of the Nazi teams showed up one day. Some residents of the area were pressed into service to transport the Jews and Gypsies to their execution site; some were made to inventory their belongings, others forced to dig the mass graves or deal with the blood flowing from the murdered corpses, or to fill in the graves to cover the bodies.
Villagers not directly involved were forced to watch the executions so that they, too, would experience the demonstration of Nazi power.
As he learned more about these incidents, Fr. Desbois became convinced of the urgency of documenting them while there were still people living who had memories to share.
“All of them want to speak before they die,” he said of those living witnesses.
Fr. Desbois received permission from the cardinal-archbishop of Paris to undertake the work on larger scale, and the Yahad-in-Unum Association was founded 10 years ago.
Now, with a full-time staff of 20, Yahad-in-Unum researchers comb through archives to identify execution sites and compile the names of victims, then a video team travels to the villages — in Ukraine, Russia, Poland, Belarus and Moldova — to interview surviving witnesses, document their testimony and learn where the victims were buried.
Because of Fr. Desbois’ work, many Jews in Europe and America now know just what happened to their parents, grandparents or other relatives, and where their remains were buried. And many of those have traveled to the sites to pray the Kaddish, the traditional Hebrew mourner’s pray, the text of which is based on passages from Ezekiel, Daniel, Genesis, Deuteronomy and Job.
And those descendants and relatives are not the only ones praying for the victims. “I carry all of them in my prayers,” Fr. Desbois said.
Besides praying for them all, collectively, he says he also focuses on some victims — such as one 5-year-old boy and a 4-year-old girl — whose tragic early deaths stuck him particularly hard.
To date, Yahad-in-Unum teams have interviewed more than 3,000 witnesses and identified more than 800 mass killing sites with more than 2,000 mass graves.
But Fr. Desbois stresses that time is running out, as even those who were children at the time are now few and far between.
