In honor of International Holocaust Memorial Day
By RABBI LEVI WELTON
The old man’s fingers tapped absentmindedly on his cane as he spoke in Russian. He hadn’t been a Nazi but had been hired by the Third Reich to gather up the Jews of his village and shoot them one by one. As he spoke to the priest in front of him, he recounted the location of the mass grave, the reward he had received from the Nazi’s, and the many hours it took each Sunday to shoot hundreds of babies, women and men in the skull.
Suddenly, he paused as if he had realized something and looked directly at the priest.
“Father, will the Lord forgive me for my sin?”
Although his skin had been crawling for the past hour, the priest had to control himself from saying what he truly wanted to say to this cold-blooded murderer. But Father Patrick Desbois had only reached this man under the guise that he was conducting a “world history project” and not that he was really one of the world’s foremost anti-Nazi Holocaust researchers. So he bit his tongue and placidly replied,
“Forgive you for which sin, my son?”
“Which sin? Why, the sin of working all those hours on the Lord’s Day, of course.”
Father Patrick felt the urge to vomit.
— — — — — — — — — -
These are the moments that Father Patrick Desbois must endure to uncover the previously undocumented mass graves of Jews massacred in the territories of the former Soviet Union. Author of the acclaimed book “The Holocaust by Bullets:A Priest’s Journey to Uncover the Truth Behind the Murder of 1.5 Million Jews,” he is a consultant to the Vatican who has made it his life’s mission to fight anti-Semitism and shatter the silence surrounding the murder of Jews outside of the concentration camps. With Holocaust denial increasing all over the world, the Jewish people have found a surprising champion in this French Catholic priest.
How did this happen?
Turns out that Father Desbois was born 10 years after the end of World War II and grew up in a secular home in France where he studied mathematics in university. In an interview published in Aish.com, he said that is was “Min Hashamayim” (Hebrew for “Divine providence”) that led him to the calling to become a priest and then subsequently being chosen by the church to reconciliation efforts between Catholics and Jews. But it was a story with his grandfather that really got him involved in fighting anti-semitism.
His grandfather had been a French prisoner of war in a Nazi camp in Rava Ruska on the Polish-Ukrainian border. His grandfather didn’t want to discuss what happened there but Father Desbois was relentless and eventually his grandfather said “Inside the camp, it was awful. But outside, it was worse.” After he became a priest, he visited Rava Ruska and one night the mayor took him to the edge of the forest where 50 elderly villagers were waiting. The mayor said, “Patrick, I bring you to the mass grave of the last 1500 Jews of Rava Ruska.” He began to study the history of the Nazi’s in eastern Europe and founded a group in Paris devoted to bringing to light the undocumented victims of the Holocaust and to preserving their memory. He called it Yahad-In Unum, which comes from the Hebrew and Latin words for “together.”
Father Desbois went on to receive the Légion d’honneur, France’s highest honor, and his work to fight the Nazi’s through education of their crimes has garnered international attention, including coverage in the Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, TIME magazine, CBS’s “60 Minutes” and many more media outlets. Additionally, he has been bestowed with six honorary doctorates from universities including NYU and Bar Ilan, and has been recognized with numerous awards including the Medal of Valor by the Simon Wiesenthal Center, the B’nai B’rith International Award for Outstanding Contribution to Relations with the Jewish People, the Humanitarian Award by the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, and even a tribute from the U.S. Special Envoy to Monitor and Combat Anti-Semitism.
Most recently, Father Desbois joined the ranks of the Dalai Lama and Nobel Laureate Elie Wiesel when he received the distinguished “Lantos Human Rights Prize”. At the special ceremony in Washington D.C., the President of the Lantos Foundation for Human Rights and Justice, Katrina Lantos Swett, said “At a time when anti-Semitic acts are surging globally, Father Desbois’ work is more important than ever…Exposing the truth, honoring the victims, and memorializing these events is a vital safeguard against a repetition of these horrors.” As Pittsburgh and the world still come to grips with the deadliest anti-Semitic attack in American history, her words ring true now more than ever before.
So I wondered what Rev. Desbois would say about the implications of his Holocaust research on modern anti-Semitism and mass genocide. Thanks to my dear friend Uri Kaufthal, who is the President of American Friends of Yahad-In Unum, I was able to spend some quality time with Father Desbois on one of his busy trips to New York City.
RLW: “The Wall Street Journal has said about you that ““Father Desbois is a generation too late to save lives. Instead, he has saved memory and history.” Aside for combating Holocaust deniers, why is your work important for fighting modern anti-semitism?
FPD: “One Polish man once told me “Hitler made a mistake by making concentration camps because now the Jews are coming back to visit them. But if there’s mass shootings, the Jews won’t come back.” The legacy of the “Holocaust by bullets” today is that the world will never tolerate another concentration camp with sarin gas but it will tolerate mass shootings with bullets. So the more the world is aware of the crimes that were swept under the rug because they weren’t documented, the more we can prevent this evil replicating itself. In Europe, we’re seeing how electoral successes for the ultra-right are accompanied with a rise in attacks on Jews while left wing parties give ethical cover to anti-Semites with constant criticism of Israel. Even my own country [France] is not immune. It’s a nice country. We have 20 million tourists a year. But we have military even around Notre Dame Cathedral.We have to wake up? What are we waiting for?”
RLW: “Is it true that the amount of Jewish victims murdered by the “Holocaust in Bullets” makes number of Jews killed in the Holocaust closer to 8 million than 6 million?”
FPD: “I know everyone has this question but I’m not an accountant of the dead. That’s a typical Himler question. I work for families. I’m always looking for [just] one.”
RLW: I know you came out with a new book titled “The Terrorist Factory:
Isis, The Yazidi Genocide and Exporting Terror” based on your investigation of the Yazidi genocide in Iraq. And in your interview with Lara Logan from Sixty Minutes, you said that “It’s not the same ideology but it’s the same disease.” How did you go from lecturing about the Holocaust at the Sorbonne and Georgetown University to fighting genocide like this on a global scale?
FPD: “This is exactly what I was talking about before about awareness about history preventing evil replicating itself in our days. Everyone says ISIS is dead. But with my team, when we go to Iraq, we still meet Yazidis who just escaped from them. ISIS has learned from the Holocaust and have perfected the tactics the Nazi’s used when they murdered Jews 70 years ago. It’s the same system, the same methodology, the same evil.They won’t make the mistake of creating concentration camps because the world won’t tolerate that. So they’ve focused on public executions, enlisting local help, and the 3 ingredients the Nazi’s realized are necessary for any successful genocide campaign: money, sex and ideology.
The Nazi’s profited by robbing Jewish families before they herded them to mass graves where they were shot — telling their victims they would be deported to Palestine. Each squad travelled with its own car full of sex slaves — more often girls than women, held back from the killing fields for a time. The killing, rapes and theft were all legal under a Nazi ideology which treated Jews as a problem and death as the solution. The only difference between the Nazi’s and ISIS is that ISIS is now brainwashing children as young as 7 years old to become terrorists. One boy we rescued told us about how their days are filled with terrorist training and nightly videos of beheadings and crucifixions. “One boy told me, ‘they stole my brain.’ I never heard anyone say that: they stole my brain.”
RLW: I know that you’ve consulted with the United Nations about the need for Holocaust education in the past. Are you consulting with them now about the atrocities conducted by ISIS?
FPD: “Yes, we’ve interviewed over 6,000 witnesses, reconstructed thousands of massacres and identified nearly 2,500 previously unknown execution sites in Eastern Europe. Additionally, Yahad-In Unum has set up a center in Kurdistan, Iraq to de-program children who are rescued from ISIS and to prevent ISIS from recruiting others.”
RLW: “One last question?”
FPD: “Sure.”
RLW: “One of the key differences between our faiths is that Jews don’t believe it necessary to missionize and convert the world to our religion. This is based on the teaching of the Talmudic sage Rabbi Yehoshua who said that ““the righteous of all peoples have a share in the World to Come” (Tosefta, Sanhedrin 13:2). Rather, anyone who follows in the path of the Biblical Noah and focuses on restoring justice to the world is given the honorific “Chassedei Umos Ha’olam” — “Righteous People of the World”. (This is also the source for the “Righteous Gentile” award from the Yad Vashem Museum in Jerusalem). How does it feel knowing that Jews around the world refer to you with this same honorific?
FPD: “Well, first I would say “Boruch Hashem!” (Hebrew for “Thank God!”). But as a Catholic, I feel that if we don’t care about the Jews who were shot and buried like animals in mass graves, why should we care about mass shootings in Paris or America? In other words, if that is not worth our time to document, then we’re giving legitimacy for any mass killing today whether its in Iraq, Syria, Darfur and so on. There are mass shootings of Muslims and Christians every day and people shouldn’t forget about it. Doesn’t it say in the Bible (Genesis 4:10) after Cain murdered Abel that “And God said, “What have you done? Hark! Your brother’s blood cries out to Me from the earth.” We have a moral obligation to remember and I’m seeing now that Jews are coming back to these mass graves in the former Soviet Union, for the first time in history, to say the Kaddish prayer. To me, that’s a sign that other people will return to the mass graves of their people as well. You know, I don’t have a sense of “success” in my work but, after everything I’ve seen and heard, I would say that my biggest success is that I still have faith and hope in humanity that we can treat each other as God’s children.”