Continent of Extermination

"We have only four or five years left to finish our work; the witnesses are old. It is why we are accelerating our research to record the final mass graves."
Father Patrick Desbois, Yahad-In Unum

Mass execution of Jewish women and children, Mizoch village, Ukrainian SSR, 14.10.1942

The mass murders of Jews, Roma and Communist Party members was carried out across Eastern Europe from Poland to Azerbaijan between 1941 and 1944, by SS units that followed advancing German forces. Unlike the secretive barbed-wire enclosures of the death camps, where only the stench of the chimneys burning the bodies of those who had been suffocated by Zyclon B, told the tale in the ashes falling to fertilize the fields of surrounding village farms.

The operation of "the Holocaust by bullets" was different. It was public, and the people living in the towns and villages who were not Jews, were able to observe as their Jewish neighbours were murdered en masse by bullets to the head. Since the regime didn't want to 'waste' too much ammunition, instructions were clear: one bullet, one body. Sometimes the villagers were deployed to dig the mass graves that would hold the murdered victims.

France's Father Patrick Desbois and his teams of researchers through his organization, Yahad-In Unum (Hebrew/Latin "together") have spanned out over the years collecting artefacts and information, memories and accounts of that time when Jews were considered the scum that the Earth must be cleared of, along with political dissenters, gays and gypsies. They have so far gathered the testimony of over 3,800 witnesses to the "Holocaust by bullets" exercise of extermination.

Father Desbois has himself personally interviewed witnesses in their hundreds, elderly but with memories intact of those dreadful events, in places like Ukraine, Romania, Belarus, Moldova and Russia. Yahad-In Unum was co-founded by Father Desbois in 2004 to make certain that the history of the Holocaust in Eastern Europe did not die with its witnesses.

Many of whom watched as the Einsatzgrupen murdered their neighbours a close range. "Every victim saw his killer, and every killer saw his victim. There were no trains and no extermination camps; these were personal crimes", said Father Desbois. This represented the first act of a dreadful symphony of slaughter that culminated in the industrialized extermination that took place in Belzec, Treblinka, Auschwitz and Sobibor, among other death camps.

The orders were to use "one bullet for one Jew", to counteract shortages. Jews would be herded to quarries, ravines or forests with promises of deportation to Palestine. When they gathered they would be robbed, stripped and shot. Einsatzgruppen, according to Father Desbois' research, often chose to throw children into mass graves with their families, without shooting them; burying them alive. One

Crimean woman, as a child, who managed to claw her way out of a mass grave found her way out by following the roots of a tree.

The Holocaust involved, said Father Desbois, a "continent of extermination".

The German government helps to fund Yahad-In Unum, along with private family foundations, individual donors, and whoever else seeks to sustain the memory of the Holocaust. Father Desbois's first book, The Holocaust by Bullets: A Priest's Journey to Uncover the Truth behind the Murder of 1.5-Million Jews, won the 2998 National Jewish Book Award.