The Catholic priest who is ‘brother’ to Holocaust victims

MIRAH LANGER

Using metal detectors, he has unearthed the physical remnants of lives lost: the Magen Davids that Jewish prisoners tore from their necks to prevent Nazis obtaining them. In one instance, he found pieces of a harmonica played by a Nazi while waiting for prisoners to dig their own graves.

For a man whose life’s work has been uncovering some of the darkest and most brutal dimensions of human nature, in person, Desbois exudes warmth, gentleness, and humility. He spoke to the SA Jewish Report while he was in South Africa as a guest of honour at the opening of the Johannesburg Holocaust and Genocide Centre’s permanent exhibition last week.

Desbois is the founder of Yahad-In Unum (YIU), which means “together in one”. Since 2004, this non-profit organisation has tasked itself with discovering the truth about these mass executions. YIU has collected testimony from about 5 700 witnesses, and tracked down and mapped more than 2 700 sites, mostly kept secret until now. Of the 2.2 million Jews killed in the region between 1941 and 1944, the organisation has managed to confirm the fate of 1.5 million. Desbois remains determined to identify the remaining 750 000 as well. Over time, the organisation has also expanded its scope, recently working with survivors of the Yazidi massacre in Iraq, which was perpetrated by the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria.

Desbois tells how perhaps the most chilling artefacts he has collected are the photographs sent by Nazi officials travelling through Poland, Ukraine, Belarus, and Lithuania, to their loved ones back home. The subject matter? Scenes of the mass murder of Jews, Roma, and others deemed undesirable and thus deserving to die.

“What was strange was that the Germans sent these photographs back to their wives or lovers. We have found 400 pictures of the shootings,” says Desbois. “They wanted a souvenir. Even if they were not the shooters, they wanted to pose in the middle (of the graves and corpses), like you do when you kill an elephant.”

Desbois paraphrases the typical captions found on the back of the photographs: “They would write: ‘My lover, you see what we do with the Jewish children; we throw them like balloons and we shoot. Imagine, my lover, if we didn’t do that, what then the Jews would do in Germany…’

“The Nazis were very proud of it,” explains Desbois.

Born in 1955 in a small village in France, to a family who ran a shop selling chicken and cheese, Desbois has travelled an extraordinary path. “I am from a simple family and we try to do what we have to do,” says Desbois, describing himself. He decided to become a priest as a young adult. At this time, he says, he began asking what G-d had planned for him. “I asked him, ‘What do you want? Show me what you want.’”

He had little clue at the time that, in fact, part of the answer lay hidden in his own history. His grandfather, a French soldier, had been denounced during the war for being “anti-German”, taken as a prisoner of war, and deported to the village of Rava-Ruska in Ukraine. Desbois says although he was always very close to his grandfather, this part of his life was never discussed. “It was a taboo.”

In fact, for most of his youth, Desbois knew nothing at all about the Holocaust. There was no mention of it on the news, or at school. The first time he encountered it was at age 15. “I found a book with pictures of the camp. I remember I closed the book and said to myself, ‘I understand’, and then left.” Now, he realises, he was in complete shock.

Years later, Desbois was organising a pilgrimage in Ukraine when he got lost. Soon he realised that the village he inadvertently had entered was Rava-Ruska. “In one night, I realised my life had changed.” So began a journey of discovery for Desbois. On repeat trips back, he began to uncover more about the history of the village during the war, particularly the murder of 18 000 Jews.

“One day, the mayor brought me to the forest with 50 farmers who had been present at the killing of the last 1 500 Jews in the village. All these farmers were very old, very poor, and had been waiting for hours. They gathered in a circle around the mass grave and they explained what they saw.”

For Desbois, the encounter was a revelation: “I realised the killings were public; I realised people wanted to speak; I realised we could find the mass graves.”

With the mayor’s help, Desbois began what he terms his “war of memory” to discover the fate of these forgotten victims. His work has been aided by Soviet cultural values, as opposed to Western ideas about guilt and shame. “We (YIU) benefit from a Russian proverb that says ‘The war is finished when we bury the last victim’. So for them (the local witnesses), we come to finish the war.”

Desbois has been able to piece together the Nazis’ precise methodology of murder. This includes details such as how the shooting sites would always be located in the direction of a train station – to give credence to the ruse that the Jews were en route to being deported to what was then Palestine. Moreover, there were always two shooters and three pushers at the killings. When the pushers saw a weak person, they could just throw them straight into the grave to be buried alive, thus saving bullets.

According to this script of slaughter, the Germans would always frame the killings to the locals as the execution of a legal death penalty. Thus, “the Nazi officials transformed the killing of Jews into a carnival”, says Desbois. He notes the complexity of the psychology behind mass killings being presented as a public spectacle. “When there is a death penalty, people want to watch… It’s difficult to admit, but (for bystanders) when you know you’re safe, that you’re not a Jew or gypsy, not gay, and not communist – then you know that you have been chosen for life. For these people, there is a kind of enjoyment to be alive and see the bad people die.”

Furthermore, adds Desbois, in many cases during World War II, the incentive for locals to witness the killings was material: “They knew they would take the Jews’ houses the next day.”

Desbois has written several acclaimed books reflecting on his work. He is a professor at Georgetown University in Washington DC, and in 2016 established the first Holocaust museum in Central America, located in Guatemala. He has received accolades from Pope Francis, and received the Légion d’honneur from French President Emmanuel Macron. He remains deeply involved in nurturing Judeo-Catholic relations, and committed to highlighting the horrors of all hate crime: “It’s a distortion of democracy if we don’t care about the victims.”

Regarding anti-Semitism today, Desbois cautions: “Be an optimist, but don’t dream. For Jews, if they dream too long, they wake up in a nightmare.”