In Case Anyone Was Still Denying The Holocaust… September 10, 2007

The Associated Press today ran a story on Roman Catholic Rev. Patrick Desbois. Rev. Desbois and his small team of investigators have undertaken the daunting task of asking elderly Ukrainians for their first-hand recollections of what they saw during those horrible times:

From the porch of her mud hut, Vera Filonok saw tens of thousands of Jews shot, thrown in a ravine and set on fire. Many were still alive and they writhed in the flames “like flies and worms.” The memories of what she saw in 1941 have seared her soul for six decades, but until recently she had talked about it with no one except neighbors in her remote Ukrainian village. Then a soft-spoken French priest came to town.

Roman Catholic Rev. Patrick Desbois and his small team of investigators have spent six years canvassing the towns and villages of Ukraine to patiently hear elderly people tell of what they saw during those terrible years when they were young.

He says his team has pinpointed more than 600 mass execution sites, about 70 percent of them previously unknown. It has surveyed about a third of Ukraine, he says, and estimates there are at least 2,500 such sites throughout the Texas-sized country…

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…

Anatoly Veliminchuk was 11. He said he saw people thrown into two wells, many still alive.

“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.

Kudos to the Rev. Desbois. His organization, Yahad-In Unum (Hebrew and Latin for “together”) is “devoted…to healing wounds between Catholics and Jews”.

May G-d bless his actions, and may our world have a refuah shleimah.