Genocide's Ghosts

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Tapping into the country's nationalistic animosity toward its Soviet rulers, the Nazis found plenty of helpers among Ukrainians. According to the 1996 book Hitler's Willing Executioners by Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, many Ukrainians participated in the Nazi killings of Jews during pogroms in Ukraine's villages. Some Ukrainians also helped to run Nazi concentration camps. This persecution by their own countrymen left deep bitterness among Ukrainian-Jewish Holocaust survivors, says Lee Schein, 77, who fled Rava-Ruska during the war as a 12-year-old girl, and now lives in Glen Ellen, California. "The Nazis offered the Ukrainians their own state if they worked with them, so they worked with them," she says. "It is a pure miracle that I got away." But Desbois insists he is not looking to assign blame. "I do not ask who is guilty and who is not guilty," he says. "I deal just with victims."

The stories from Desbois' witnesses have been eye-opening for younger Ukrainians too. Under the Soviet Union, the official line was that World War II was a battle between communists and fascists. The Nazis' "Final Solution" program to exterminate Jews was rarely mentioned. And although Holocaust teaching is now officially on the syllabus of Ukrainian schools, many of the nation's youth remain ignorant of what their grandparents lived through.

In the Lisinichi Forest outside the city of Lviv one day in late December, Adolf Wislowski, 77, leaned on his heavy walking stick and described for Desbois how as a child he would climb a tree and watch Nazi soldiers shoot thousands of Jews; the killings lasted for about six months. Since Wislowski's school was close to the forests, he and his classmates kept careful track of the executions, observing closely how the Nazis led the Jews to the edge of the trees, then shot them in small groups. Near the end of the war, the Nazis ordered Jewish prisoners to burn the corpses in the forests in a hurried attempt to erase the evidence before Germany's retreat from Ukraine in 1944. "Columns of smoke rose until we could barely breathe," said Wislowski, describing the massive burning program. Historians believe about 90,000 people lie in more than 40 mass graves tucked among the trees of the Lisinichi Forest, including hundreds of Italian soldiers killed by the Nazis after Italy surrendered to the Allied forces in 1943.

These days, local children play in the forests, unaware of the grim history beneath their feet. As Wislowski spoke to Desbois, two boys squatted on the ground nearby, listening intently, and afterward told TIME that they had known nothing of the killings until then. Although Jews were overwhelmingly the largest group of victims, the Nazis also shot tens of thousands of Gypsies, as well as Polish and Soviet citizens and Italian soldiers. A 26-year-old Ukrainian translator for Desbois said she knew of those deaths, but was astonished to learn about the mass killing of Jews when she met the priest last year.

Many of the stories that Desbois has uncovered took place in remote, desolate country villages that today seem frozen in a bygone age; they still have little electricity and no indoor plumbing. On New Year's Day, TIME traveled with Desbois to the tiny village of Vysotsk in northern Ukraine, a few miles from the Belarus border. We drove for nearly eight hours from Rava-Ruska through the countryside in temperatures approaching -4 degrees F (-20 degrees C). In the back of his rented van, Desbois pored over translations of documents from 1944 when Soviet officials went to Vysotsk to question villagers. Their report, now housed in the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, makes grim reading: in 1942, the Nazis gathered all of Vysotsk's 2,000 Jews and marched them to a giant pit, where they shot them in groups of five. The report estimated that 1,864 people died on a single day, with children buried alive in order to save bullets.

In Vysotsk — today a cluster of wooden houses with horse-drawn carts and creaking outdoor wells — a woman directed us to a memorial on the edge of the village. There, a large grave site was fenced off, and a Russian plaque announced that 1,864 Soviets — not Jews — were killed in 1942. So Desbois began knocking on doors along the one narrow road running through the village, in search of any witnesses to that day in 1942. "Were you living here during the war?" he asked as residents emerged from their homes, startled at the sight of an outsider. As darkness fell, Hanna Dvurinska, 79, invited us into her tiny wooden house. There she told Desbois how she had watched — as a 14-year-old girl — from her parents' living-room window, as Vysotsk's Jews were led down the road to a freshly dug grave; hours of gunshots followed. "Some of them were carrying their possessions," she said through a translator. "They knew they were going to be shot." A few doors down, Iarino Hanitko told Desbois that she remembered that day clearly, especially as her parents had hidden a Jewish boy in the house; the boy escaped the Holocaust and emigrated to the West. As Hanitko watched the columns of Jews on their way to the grave, she saw some of them being shot while trying to escape.

In this remote village, few people are still alive who can bear witness to these horrors, and it may be too late to correct the misinformation carved into the Soviet plaque beside the mass grave. But elsewhere, Desbois has used his dogged persistence to commemorate the execution of Jews before all recollection of them is lost forever. In late December, Yaroslav Nadiak, Rava-Ruska's former deputy mayor, hired workers to lay a cement gravestone with a Jewish star in Borowe, a village on the edge of town, atop the mass grave containing about 1,500 Jews — the one Nadiak had first revealed to Desbois in 2003, setting the priest on his long quest for the truth. On the last Sunday in December, a group of Ukrainian Jews drove to Rava-Ruska from Lviv, an hour away, and gathered in the snow around the grave, where they recited Kaddish, the Jewish prayer for the dead. For Desbois, this quiet ceremony in the woods was a high point after his years of wrenching work. "I want to see these people properly buried," he says. And to know that the truth about how they died will not be buried with them.