At first glance, Rev. Patrick Desbois seems an unlikely Holocaust investigator.Yet this modest Roman Catholic priest from Paris, without using much more than his calm voice and Roman collar, has shattered the silence surrounding a largely untold chapter of the Holocaust when Nazis killed 1.5 million Jews in Ukraine from 1941 to 1944.
Over the past four years, Desbois has interviewed more than 700 people who witnessed the mass murders as children and never spoke about the horrors again. In village after village, witnesses led the priest to uncover more than 800 mass graves, most previously unknown. The killings were usually done by single gunshot, with Jewish children often buried alive. The dark episode is known as the "Holocaust by Bullets."
Chicago was the first stop for Desbois, 52, on a four-city U.S. tour funded by the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum to educate Jews and Catholics about his findings. Desbois spoke Monday to more than 300 members of North Shore Congregation Israel in Glencoeand Tuesday to students and religious leaders at Catholic Theological Union in Hyde Park.
At the Catholic seminary, Desbois described the sensitive process of interviewing the aging witnesses, trying to get answers without passing judgment. He said many found solace in unlocking their memories for a priest. Most told their stories as if the killings happened yesterday.
"They are still very emotional because it's the first time they speak. They never spoke before," Desbois said. "Imagine that you are a simple person and one day they start killing everyone in your village and you are employed in that. So, they feel very bad.
"It's a relief. But, it's not a confessional. They feel like it's their duty to say where the corpse is," he said. "Their obsession is that [the bodies] have not been buried. Imagine you are young, you see 10,000 people being killed and nobody cares. ... One woman told me, 'All my life, I dreamed of somebody to tell this.'"
Desbois said his goal is to raise funds to bury the dead properly and establish a monument to the victims. The priest also wants to establish a permanent record of the Ukraine killings to help prevent genocide from happening again.
"We need to remember what happened because the next generation does not know," he said.
"We need to remember the story of anti-Semitism, so it does not happen again. We need to remember friendship between Catholics and Jews."
At times in his presentation, his voice and hands trembled. When the audience gave him a standing ovation, he shook his head, covered his eyes and wept. Later, when asked about his emotions, Desbois said he cried for the Ukrainian witnesses and the Jewish victims, tears for the living and the dead.
"I remember all these people. I remember the dead and I remember the living. I carry them all with me now," Desbois said.
Betsy Katz, a board member of the American Jewish Committee, was one of many in the crowd who praised Desbois.
"He has such humanity, you can almost feel it," Katz said. "The fact that he's not Jewish and wants to bury our people with dignity, that really struck me."
Rev. John Pawlikowski, a Catholic Theological Union professor and longtime friend of Desbois, said the details of the Ukraine genocide are important for Jews and Catholics.
"It's important because there was substantial Christian involvement in the executions, and I think we need to really ask serious questions about why that was and what led to that," said Pawlikowski, who is also director of the school's Catholic-Jewish studies program.
"Our generation can't change that record. But, I think we need to take possession of it and say it's part of our heritage and we must be conscious of it," he said.
Desbois said he became interested in the history of the Nazis in Ukraine after his grandfather told him about being a French prisoner of war in Rava Ruska on the Polish-Ukrainian border. His grandfather spoke little about the experience except to say: "Inside the camp, it was awful. But outside, it was worse."
After becoming a priest at 31, Desbois traveled to Poland and visited Rava Ruska.
"Suddenly, it all came together. I felt that my vocation, Christ, my grandfather, the Holocaust was mixed. I wanted to see clearly what was beyond, and I began to study," he said.
In Paris, he founded a group devoted to finding the mass graves in Ukraine. The name, Yahad-In Unum, comes from the Hebrew and Latin words for "together." As he travels in the U.S., Desbois said he is surprised to find many survivors from Ukraine. In Chicago several families gave him names of relatives they believed had been killed and asked if he could search for them.
"Here, people are still looking. I think here in Chicago, there are many survivors of Ukraine. There is a large community of Ukrainian and Polish people, Christians and Jews, and they have been traumatized by all these stories," he said. "Sooner or later, you have to speak to enter the future."
Desbois said there is no simple answer to how his work has affected his faith.
"I discovered all this amount of horror, that no one ever speaks of ... so, it's a challenge to believe in God and to know all that horror," he said. "But since I was born, I learned that God exists and that horror also exists, and you have to fight and you have to be strong. So, the challenge is to fight."
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