Horror of unrecorded Nazi massacres revealed
By Maria Danilova and Randy Herschaft
Less known is the Holocaust By Bullets, in which more than two million Jews were gunned down in towns and villages across Ukraine, Belarus and Russia.
Their part in the Nazis' Final Solution has been under-researched, their bodies left unidentified in unmarked mass graves.
Shoah, French filmmaker Claude Lanzmann's documentary, stands as the 20th century's epic visual record of the Holocaust. Now another Frenchman, a Catholic priest named Patrick Desbois, is filling in a different part of the picture.
Desbois has interviewed more than 800 eyewitnesses and pinpointed hundreds of mass graves strewn around dusty fields in the former Soviet Union. The result is a book, The Holocaust by Bullets, and an exhibition at New York's Museum of Jewish Heritage.
Brought to Ukraine by a twist of fate, Desbois has spent seven years trying to document the truth, honour the dead, relieve witnesses of their pain and guilt and prevent future acts of genocide.
About 1,4 million of Soviet Ukraine's 2,4 million Jews were executed, starved to death or died of disease during the war.
A further 550 000 to 650 000 Soviet Jews were killed in Belarus and up to 140 000 in Russia, according to the US Holocaust Memorial Museum. Most of the victims were women, children and elderly people.
Begun after Germany invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941, the slaughter by bullets was the opening phase of what became the Nazis' Final Solution with its factories of death in Auschwitz and other camps in Nazi-occupied Poland.
Desbois devotes his 233-page book, published by Palgrave Macmillan, to his work in Ukraine, where he says he has uncovered more than 800 mass extermination sites, more than two-thirds of them previously unknown.
Since the book was written, he has expanded his search for mass graves into Belarus, and plans to look in areas of Russia occupied by the Germans.
Sometimes bursting into tears, old men and women from poor Ukrainian villages recount to Desbois how women, children and elders were marched or carted in from neighbouring towns to be shot, burnt to death or buried alive by German troops, Romanian forces, squads of local Ukrainian collaborators and ethnic German volunteers.
Even then, it was methodical, Desbois' research shows. Germans would arrive in a town or village and gather intelligence on how best to transport the victims to extermination sites, where to execute them and how to dispose of their bodies.
Among Desbois' key findings is the widespread use of local children to help bury the dead, wait on the German soldiers during meals and remove gold teeth and other valuables from the bodies.
His work has also yielded evidence that the killings were most frequently carried out in the open, in daylight and in a variety of ways - shooting victims, throwing them alive into bonfires, walling up a group of Jews in a cellar that wasn't opened until 12 years later.
Desbois' witnesses are mostly Orthodox Christian, and he comes to them as a priest, dressed in black and wearing a clerical collar, taking in their pain and trying to ease their suffering. Many have never before talked about their experiences.
In the village of Ternivka, about 320km south of Kiev where 2 300 Jews were killed, a frail, elderly woman, who identified herself only as Petrivna, revealed the unbearable task the Nazis imposed on her.
The young schoolgirl saw her Jewish neighbours thrown into a large pit, many still alive and convulsing in agony. Her task was to trample on them barefoot to make space for more. One of those she had to tread on was a classmate.
"You know, we were very poor, we didn't have shoes," Petrivna told Desbois, her body twitching in pain, he writes in his book. "It is not easy to walk on bodies."
Desbois says the stories give him nightmares. The most difficult is "to bear the horrors that the witnesses tell me, because often the people are simple, very kind and want to tell me everything".
He adds: "You have to be able to listen, to accept, to bear this horror. I am not here to judge the people's guilt, we are here to know what happened."
Desbois has personal roots in his project, dating to 2002, when he first visited Ukraine to see the place where his grandfather was interned as a French prisoner in World War 2.
When he arrived, the locals told him of a stream of blood that had run from the site where the Jews were executed, and of a dismembered woman hanging from a tree after the Nazis threw a grenade in a pit full of people. When he was offered a visit to more villages, he did not hesitate.
"I am in a hurry to establish the truth and justice so that the world can know that the Germans never left a tiny village in Ukraine, Belarus and Russia without killing Jews there."
He believes that talking to Orthodox believers about the killing of their Jewish neighbours, his work advances his healing mission.
"My book is also an act of prevention of future acts of genocide." - Sapa-AP
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