In front of a standing room-only crowd in WJU's Troy
Theater on the evening of March 18, Father Patrick Desbois discussed his work in uncovering the the Holocaust in the former Soviet Union. His presentation opened with a short film that included several interviews with Ukrainian and Belorussian peasants, who witnessed the German murder of Jews in their villages. Desbois and the team working for his organization Yahad-In Unum have interviewed over 3200 witnesses in Eastern Europe. While the Holocaust was long thought to be a secretive affair, Desbois's work has clearly illustrated that it was a very public event in the Soviet Union.
He told a mesmerized crowd about interviewees who witnessed their childhood friends dragged away to the execution sites and others who went to watch the murders at the pit as a type of entertaining spectacle. In perhaps his most disturbing anecdote, Desbois told the story of a man who moved into the house of Jews who had been killed by the Germans. While this occurred frequently throughout occupied Europe during the war, in this case, the bodies of the two Jews were still in the house when he took it over. He then buried them right outside the back door.
After a 45 minute talk detailing both the process of locating and interviewing witnesses, Desbois answered audience questions for another 30 minutes, with the majority of them focusing on issues raised in both the talk and his book, The Holocaust by Bullets. He ended his talk with a call for the audience to speak up for the persecuted and to be active witnesses in case of violence or dispossession.
The Wheeling Jesuit History Department would like to thank Father Debois, Yahad-In Unum's Robin Massee, and the more than 350 visitors from Wheeling Park High School, Wheeling Central, Shadyside High School, and Temple Shalom for attending the event.
