French priest collects testimony in pioneering Holocaust research

Associated Press Writers
Published Monday, September 10, 2007





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.

With the Soviet collapse, the declassification of Soviet war archives and the general opening up of this country of 47 million, it has now become possible to speak to the witnesses.

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."

While the Soviet Union glorified its victory over the Nazis, it refused to acknowledge the massive and systematic killings of Jews. The refusal reflected both anti-Semitism and official resistance to singling out ethnic groups in what was supposed to be a single Soviet nation.

Historians say some 1.4 million of Soviet Ukraine's 2.4 million Jews were executed, starved to death or died of disease during the war. Their remains are strewn around the country in common graves, many of them ignored and unmarked.

The destruction of Ukrainian Jewry is epitomized by Babi Yar, a ravine in the capital Kiev where the Nazis killed about 34,000 Jews during just two days in September 1941. What happened in Bogdanovka was even bloodier -- 48,000 killed. And the perpetrators were not Germans but Romanians and the Ukrainian police they enlisted to help them play their own part in Hitler's genocide.

In 1941, Romanian troops allied with the Nazis occupied a large part of what is now southern Ukraine and began exterminating Jews. Those who survived the initial killings were herded to Bogdanovka and placed in stables and pigsties teeming with fleas and manure.

The massacre began when the Romanians and Ukrainians nailed shut one of the pigsties' doors and windows, then torched it, burning all inside alive. The killing went on for three weeks in late December 1941 and early January 1942 -- with a break for Christmas.

Vera Filonok was 16 when she witnessed the blaze from Konstantinovka, a village lying across the quiet Bug River. "We sensed the smell -- of burning hair, clothes, bones -- a very strong, acrid smell," she said, raising a hand to her wrinkled face. "People were being burned alive. For me that was the most terrifying thing."

After the fire came gunshots, recalled Filonok's neighbor Raya Trofimova. A German soldier living in her family's home lent her his binoculars; through them she saw victims kneel in front of a gully in their underwear, their valuables piled beside them.

"They would line them up before the ravine and shoot them ... they would tear away children from mothers and just throw them in there," said Trofimova, now 85. When her mother returned home that day, Trofimova recalled, she shut the windows and draped them with blankets to shield her three children from the sights and smells.

"Ta-ta-ta," Trofimova mimicked the gunshots ringing out across the river, day and night. "And what could we do? If you protested, you would be taken to the same pit."


"I felt bad, it was painful -- what did it matter that they spoke their Jewish way and we spoke Ukrainian or Moldovan?" he asked as he pointed to what used to be the wells -- now two small pits in a field covered with dry grass and discarded plastic bottles.

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.

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.