Father Patrick Desbois is a French Catholic priest who, virtually single-handedly, has undertaken the task of excavating the history of previously undocumented Jewish victims of the Holocaust in the former Soviet Union, including an estimated 1.5 million people who were murdered in Ukraine. Father Desbois was born 10 years after the end of World War II — and yet, through his tireless actions, he exemplifies the “righteous gentile.” The term is generally used to recognize non-Jews who, during the Holocaust, risked their lives to save Jews from the Nazis. Father Desbois is a generation too late to save lives. Instead, he has saved memory and history.
How much he has accomplished since 2002 can be seen in “The Shooting of Jews in Ukraine: Holocaust By Bullets,” which runs until March 15 at the Museum of Jewish Heritage in New York. The exhibit was created by the Memorial de la Shoah Paris in cooperation with Father Desbois’s organization, Yahad in Unum (the words for “together” in Hebrew and Latin). It follows the publication last August of his book “Holocaust By Bullets” (Palgrave MacMillan).
Kendall, thanks for posting this important story. Fr. Desbois should be valorized and highly praised for this tireless devotion to preserving the memory of one of the most horrifying atrocities of all time. So now, in addition to the 6 million Jews we previously knew to be slaughtered by the Nazis (along with millions of Polish Catholics, gypsies, homosexuals, and other target groups), we have to add 1.5 million more Ukrainian Jews, who were slaughtered in an even more violent and gruesome way than the silent gas chambers of Auschwitz, etc. And on top of it all, we have the grim, disgusting record of how the Nazis forced children and teens to do some of their dirty work.
But as commendable as this monumental project is, it leaves me pondering a disqueting question: Who is going to do the same thing for all the martyred Christians of the brutal 20th century? For the number of fellow Christians who were killed by cruel, insecure dictators and their henchmen in Muslim and Communist lands just because of their deep devotion to their Lord and Savior actually dwarfs the size of the Jewish Holocaust. And yet few Christians seem to care. Where are the Christian Holocaust museums? And who will record the stories of these innocent victims of persecution and terror, as Fr. Desbois has done and is doing for Soviet Jews?
David Handy+