Backing up Holocaust testimony

A Catholic Priest is leading a movement to bring to light the testimony of non-Jewish Ukrainians who witnessed the Holocaust. And he’s finding that it was even worse than reported.

Roman Catholic Rev. Patrick Desbois and his small team of investigators have spent six years canvassing the towns and villages of Ukraine to patiently hear elderly people tell of what they saw during those terrible years when they were young.

He says his team has pinpointed more than 600 mass execution sites, about 70 percent of them previously unknown. It has surveyed about a third of Ukraine, he says, and estimates there are at least 2,500 such sites throughout the Texas-sized country.

The work of Desbois and his Yahad-In Unum group is adding important new information to the history of the Holocaust – a period exhaustively studied in some countries but still veiled in much of the former Soviet Union.

[…] Vital to the effort, says Desbois, is the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington and its vast Soviet archival material available. That and Desbois’ field work have expanded historians’ knowledge about the public nature of the killings, the large variety of methods of execution, and the Nazis’ forced recruitment of children to assist in their actions.

“You have a marriage of validation with the sources 60 years apart,” said Paul Shapiro, director of the Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington. “Using the two sources together one can understand what happened on the ground in those towns and villages in Ukraine.”

[…] Desbois registers an event or killing site only after obtaining three independent witness accounts. His team has two translators, a photographer and cameraman, a ballistics specialist and a mapping expert.

Why is a Catholic priest working so hard to document the destruction of Ukraine’s Jews?

The 52-year-old priest was raised on his grandfather’s stories of surviving a Nazi prison camp in Ukraine, and has devoted his career to healing wounds between Catholics and Jews. His group, Yahad-In Unum – which combines the Hebrew and Latin words for “together” – was founded by influential Catholics and Jews.

Good for him. Another righteous Gentile helps to heal the world.

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3 Responses to Backing up Holocaust testimony

  1. John F. MacMichael says:

    He is doing important work. 60+ years after the war there cannot be many of these witnesses left. The truth is precious but very fragile.

  2. Michael Lonie says:

    The Nazis recruited children to help in their actions?

    No matter how deep you think you have gone, there is always some level of evil to the Nazis even deeper.

  3. David M says:

    Trackbacked by The Thunder Run – Web Reconnaissance for 09/11/2007
    A short recon of what’s out there that might draw your attention, updated throughout the day…so check back often.
    Today highlighting 9/11 posts, along with other must read info from around the net.

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