While the Catholic Church's early and too-often collaboration with Nazi Germany is forever shameful, one French Catholic priest is doing something to redress that.
The Rev. Patrick Desbois has researched a lesser-known part of Hitler's campaign to kill as many European Jews as possible, and published a book, "Holocaust by Bullets", about how the German Army's advance into the Soviet Union in 1941 was accompanied by the murder of 2 million or so Jews.
We all know about death camps like Auschwitz and Treblinka, with their gas chambers and crematoria, but fewer know anything about the Einsatzgruppen, an SS unit that killed Jews one-by-one in the eastern Soviet Union.
Desbois' book tells part of that story -- remarkably, he discovered more than 500 previously unknown mass extermination sites in Ukraine.
And Desbois got first-person accounts from people who were there when the "holocaust by bullets" happened.
Details, below.
The linked-above AP story about this begins with:
The Holocaust has a landscape engraved in the mind's eye: barbed-wire fences, gas chambers, furnaces.
Less known is the "Holocaust by Bullets," in which over 2 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.
Until Desbois, by familial happenstance:
first visited Ukraine to see the place where his grandfather was interned as a French prisoner in World War II.
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.
He was intrigued by that story, and:
When he was offered a visit to more villages, he did not hesitate.
"I am in a hurry to find all the bones, to establish the truth and justice so that the world can know what happened and that the Germans never left a tiny village in Ukraine, Belarus and Russia without killing Jews there."
Desbois interviewed many people who recalled the 1941 bullet-Holocaust. This one is bone-chilling:
In the village of Ternivka, some 200 miles 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 neighbors 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 in a single breath, her body twitching in pain, Desbois writes in his book. "You see, it is not easy to walk on bodies."
Desbois, understandably, had nightmares after hearing these stories, but he wanted, in his words:
to bear the horrors that the witnesses tell me, because often the people are simple, very kind, and want to tell me everything.
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 is active in a French group, Yahad In Unum, of Catholics and Jews interested in bridging the centuries-old controversies between the two faiths.
Desbois hopes that his discoveries will lead to an understanding by all that "a genocide is simply people killing people, My book is also an act of prevention of future acts of genocide."
Amen.