French priest hunts for graves from the Holocaust

The fields, at first, appear unremarkable.

These mass graves from the Holocaust weren't supposed to stick out.

But the Rev. Patrick Desbois has devoted his life to finding them. Slowly, during visits to barren landscapes across Eastern Europe, the French priest will uncover artifacts hinting at the horrors that took place there decades ago:

A shard of jewelry left tossed in a bush. A shell casing covered by overgrown grass.

What Desbois finds most often, however, are stories from local villagers - witnesses who've remained and told him what they remember.

He records the interviews - so far more than 3,800 in all - and saves the artifacts, cataloging history to try to avoid its repeat.

"We have to learn to be the firewall," Desbois said Sunday during a speech at Gratz College, "otherwise, tomorrow will be the same story."

During the last decade, Desbois' team has uncovered more than 1,300 Holocaust execution sites, most of which were previously undocumented. He estimates the graves contain 1.5 million victims.

He discussed those findings during a keynote address at a Holocaust "teach-in" at the Melrose Park college. As he talked, his audience occasionally gasped.

The 59-year-old Roman Catholic priest spoke quickly and matter-of-factly in heavily accented English. His speech was filled with stories of brutality, born of research that has taken him to homes and fields in eight European countries.

In one instance, Desbois said, farmers in Ukraine told him about dozens of Jews who were forced to dig a grave 26 feet deep.

The ditch was rigged with explosives to kill the diggers. One surviving witness - a teenager at the time - told Desbois that after detonation, she was forced to remove victims' limbs from the trees.

At another site, Desbois said, witnesses remembered Jews being lain side by side in a ditch. Guards then opened fire at the masses below, pleased that they could murder with such efficiency.

The atrocities Desbois goes looking for generally occurred around 1941, before the Nazis met at Wannsee to implement the Final Solution.

He uncovers the brutalities by visiting sites where historical documents mention killings. He knocks on doors around town and tries to find people who might have seen what happened.

In many cases, he said, witnesses are eager to speak. He'll regularly invite them to show him the grave site, where he and his team sometimes find evidence.

They never dig up the graves, but they've found many items on the surface, like jewelry from victims or shell casings from bullets fired during the mass killings.

Once, Desbois recalled, a witness remembered a German guard playing a harmonica near a grave. Using a metal detector, Desbois then found the instrument in the field.

Desbois was initially drawn to this research because of his grandfather, a French soldier who was briefly detained in a Nazi prison camp during the war.

But what may have begun as a quixotic personal quest has since become Desbois' full-time job.

He now heads a foundation, Yahad in Unum, which employs two dozen researchers to investigate and track mass graves from the Holocaust across Eastern Europe. The phrase, in Hebrew and Latin, means "together in one."

Results are mapped online, and artifacts have been displayed in museum exhibits. Desbois regularly speaks in lecture halls and to the media, and in 2008, he wrote a book, Holocaust by Bullets, which earned the National Jewish Book Award.

Desbois also stresses the danger of apathy toward mass killings - something he said was evident during the Holocaust. In the part of his speech Sunday that drew the most reaction from the crowd, Desbois called it human nature to be bystanders to genocide and urged the audience to avoid that mind-set.

"We try to think it's not human because we want to sleep well," he said.

Audience member Pamela Rosenthal, 53, of Blue Bell, said she planned to discuss that point with her daughters and found all of Desbois' work thought-provoking. "I think it hits on a lot of levels," she said after the event. "I love that he's documenting history."

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