Some 1.4 million of Soviet Ukraine's 2.4 million Jews were executed, starved to death or died of disease during the war. The result is a book, "The Holocaust by Bullets," and an exhibition through March 15 at New York's Museum of Jewish Heritage.īrought to Ukraine by a twist of fate, Desbois has spent seven years trying to document the truth, honor the dead, relieve witnesses of their pain and guilt and prevent future acts of genocide. Now another Frenchman, a Catholic priest named Patrick Desbois, is filling in a different part of the picture.ĭesbois says he has interviewed more than 800 eyewitnesses and pinpointed hundreds of mass graves strewn around dusty fields in the former Soviet Union.
"Shoah," French filmmaker Claude Lanzmann's documentary, stands as the 20th century's epic visual record of the Holocaust. Their part in the Nazis' Final Solution has been under-researched, their bodies left unidentified in unmarked mass graves. Less known is the "Holocaust by Bullets," in which over 2 million Jews were gunned down in towns and villages across Ukraine, Belarus and Russia. KIEV, Ukraine - The Holocaust has a landscape engraved in the mind's eye: barbed-wire fences, gas chambers, furnaces.
Priest uncovering beginnings of Final Solution
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Desbois' work stands as an example of how far society still must travel in order to understand the full impact of genocide and anti-Semitism. While one my sign an anti-modernist pledge and hove close to pre-1962 liturgy and doctrine, this does not give the spiritual intellect the right to repeat and legitimize historical errors within scripture without seeking to make clear those aspects of the past that were inaccurately known in centuries prior to 1962. However, one can not help but be both surprised and concerned about the number of times the issue of Jewish Deicide crops up in Christian doctrine amongst the traditionalists as well as the number of times the word Deicide occurs in their open-source pastoral correspondence. Some readers have written that the John Crossan post on "Who Killed Jesus" (see below) is a past issue and hardly worth returning to. That SSPX's exculpatory letters and statements regarding Bishop Williamson's statements fall short of retraction and disavowal betrays a disingenuousness to pronouncements that anti-Semitism is incompatible with the type of Catholicism SSPX espouses and practices. While there is something to be said for the Latin mass, the public statements and political associations of SSPX first order clerics displays a strain of anti-Semitism and xenophobia that is truly medieval in its colorings. Patrick Desbois whose work documenting the scope of the Holocaust in the Ukraine during WWII, presents evidence too graphic and solid to impeach.Īgain it is deeply regrettable that Pope Benedict XVI lifted the excommunication of this sect.
In contrast with the ultra-traditionalists comprising the SSPX, whose members as recently as January, 2009, have referred to the Jewish people as a people of deicide, and whose first order adherents have made public statements trivializing the Holocaust, we may juxtapose the example of Fr. Over a period of three weeks in late December 1941 and early January 1942 _ with a break for Christmas _ 48,000 Jews were executed in Bogdanovka. 17 months ago: A member of French priest Patrick Desbois' team shows a bullet casing which he found in Bogdanokva, the site of the biggest mass extermination of Jews in Soviet Ukraine, in Bogdanovka, Ukraine, July 16, 2007.