Genocide's Ghosts

Treading across a snowy field in the middle of the Ukrainian town of Rava-Ruska, Olga Kushta says quietly: "This is where they were shot. I watched all the killings."

Sixty-four years have passed since Kushta stood by the roadside with her teenage friends, watching Nazi soldiers day after day as they led some 5,000 Jews from the town to the rim of a giant pit, and shot them in the back at point-blank range. Kushta, now 78, says she still replays in her mind the moment when a close friend of her mother's passed by and pleaded with her for help. Drawing her woollen scarf around her head in the frigid December morning, Kushta asks: "How could I save her? I was only a child." That night she told her parents what she had witnessed. And then, for more than six decades, she never spoke about the killings again.

But the long silence — from Kushta and hundreds of other witnesses — has finally ended, thanks almost entirely to one man. His extraordinary four-year quest to document the country's mass executions has shattered decades of secrecy and denial about the slaughter of Jews that occurred after Nazi Germany invaded Ukraine in 1941.

In 2002 Patrick Desbois, a Catholic priest from Paris, visited Rava-Ruska for the first time, intrigued by tales he had heard from his grandfather as a boy. The older man had been a prisoner of war in the town in the early 1940s, and had told young Patrick that horrors had occurred there. When Desbois arrived in Rava-Ruska — a town of about 8,000 a few miles from the border with Poland — to learn what had happened, "it was like a black hole," he says. "There was nothing in the books." Desbois says the then mayor declined to divulge details. But when the priest returned a year later, the deputy mayor, Yaroslav Nadiak, led him to the forest of Borowe outside the town and revealed what Rava-Ruska's townsfolk had long known: that some 1,500 Jews had been shot and hastily buried in a mass grave there in November 1943. "He told me: 'Patrick, I could take you to a hundred villages like this,'" says Desbois. "And I said: 'OK. Let's go.'"

In fact, the number was far higher than that, and Desbois admits he had little idea of the huge task he had set himself when he began his full-time research in 2004. In 15 trips to Ukraine, the 52-year-old priest has since located more than 750 killing sites, some of which contain several mass graves, and he now suspects there may be another 1,800 graves scattered across the country. Ukraine's graves — many of them just depressions in the ground, suggesting the weight of hundreds of bodies — were neglected through decades of Soviet rule. Now, with many of the Holocaust's witnesses in their 70s and 80s, Desbois feels he is running out of time. "In five years," he says, "there will be no more witnesses."

A short, dark-haired man with a fiery intensity and stubborn tenacity, Desbois heads a nonprofit organization in Paris called Yahad-In Unum, which promotes Catholic-Jewish relations. With his mission approved by France's Catholic bishops, he has traveled thousands of miles through remote Ukrainian villages, his priest's collar helping to put locals at ease in places where foreigners are rarely seen. Desbois taught mathematics in West Africa before becoming a priest, and later worked in Algeria; he also studied Hebrew in Jerusalem, and he serves as an advisor to the Vatican on Jewish affairs. But none of that prepared him for his charged work in Ukraine's villages, where the bottled-up emotions of aging Ukrainians pour out as they describe the executions they saw, and share details that some of them have kept even from their spouses. "It's like they have been waiting for years to talk," says Desbois. "They always ask: 'Why have you come so late?'"

Historians have long known that the Holocaust involved mass executions, as well as concentration camps. Yet despite the mountain of literature, films and photographs documenting the Holocaust, Desbois has filled in a crucial missing piece of history by interviewing hundreds of people who witnessed the Ukrainian killings firsthand. "The testimony is just unbelievable," says Paul Shapiro, director of research for the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, which is honoring Desbois at a dinner in the capital in April. The Simon Wiesenthal Center, a Jewish-rights organization in Los Angeles, is awarding Desbois a Medal of Valor in May. The center's international director, Shimon Samuels, says Desbois' findings might even cast doubt on the long-accepted estimate that 6 million Jews died in the Holocaust, since "he's found killing sites we never knew existed."

For years, Holocaust researchers have relied heavily on accounts from Jewish survivors, and on official German and Soviet archives; about 16 million pages of Soviet reports are now housed in the Holocaust Memorial Museum. But Desbois has taken Holocaust research in a new direction. As he sees it, his work is more like "a police investigation," in which he tracks down eye witnesses, cross-checks their stories, and hunts for graves and bullet shells. The resulting voices of hundreds of witnesses provide a window into how a well-organized genocide could occur in these Ukrainian communities with no one choosing, or able, to stop it. That provokes profound questions about culpability and powerlessness, and the possibility of future genocides, which resonate far beyond 1940s Europe, say researchers like Shapiro. Explaining why it has taken so long to uncover such testimony, Shapiro says: "Frankly, no one ever went there before."

Unearthing the Truth
Unlike the industrial-scale, anonymous genocide in death camps such as Auschwitz — the world's iconic images of the Holocaust — Ukraine's killings were often terrifyingly intimate. While 400,000 Ukrainian Jews were murdered in concentration camps, about 1.1 million were shot dead at close range. The murders were often in full view of neighbors and acquaintances, many of whom the Nazis deployed to dig and cover the graves, then to distribute the belongings of the dead. The fact that locals sometimes received these possessions, or were ordered to help in the executions, may partly explain their long silence, says Desbois.