'Confessions' document Holocaust in Ukraine

International Herald Tribune ^ | October 5, 2007 | Elaine Sciolino

[Argentine-Firecracker]

PARIS: His subjects were mostly children and teenagers at the time, terrified witnesses to mass slaughter. Some were forced to work at the bottom rung of the Nazi Germany killing machine - as the diggers of mass graves, as cooks who fed Nazi soldiers, as seamstresses who mended clothes stripped from the Jews before execution.

The witnesses live today in rural poverty, many without running water or heat, nearing the end of their lives. So Patrick Desbois has been quietly seeking them out, roaming the back roads and forgotten fields of Ukraine, hearing their stories and searching for the unmarked common graves. He knows that they are an unparalleled source to document the murder of 1.5 million Ukrainian Jews, shot dead and buried throughout Ukraine.

He is neither a historian nor an archeologist, but a French Catholic priest. And his most powerful tools are his unadorned style - and his clerical collar.

The Nazis began killing the Jews in Ukraine following the German invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941. But with few exceptions, most notably the 1941 slaughter of nearly 34,000 Jews in the Babi Yar ravine in Kiev, much of that history has gone untold.

[Argentine-Firecracker]

"People talk as if these things happened yesterday, as if 60 years didn't exist," Desbois said. "Some ask, 'Why are you coming so late? We have been waiting for you.'"

The saddest statement: "Why are you coming so late?". For those who perished, though, no one came to save them.

[AdvisorB]

The wages of appeasement. If the West had stood up to Hitler when he attempted to retake the Ruhr Valley, this would not have happened.

This is the road that the left is taking us down as we enter the 21st century. Appeasement didn’t work then, and it certainly won’t work now. It only enboldens our enemies.

[Coleus]

A Priest Methodically Reveals Ukrainian Jews’ Fate

French priest uncovers long-buried horrors of Holocaust in Ukraine

 

See the video on NBC News

 

The French priest Patrick Desbois and members of his team walking to what used to be a well in Bogdanovka, Ukraine, where many Jews were thrown dead or still alive. (Efrem Lukatsky/The Associated Press)

[Coleus]

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[SJackson]

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[Bubba Ho-Tep]

One of 15 mass graves excavated under the direction of Father Desbois. "There was nothing to see in Ukraine because people were shot to death with guns," said Thomas Eymond-Laritaz, president of the Victor Pinchuk Foundation, Ukraine's largest philanthropic organization. "That's why Father Desbois is so important."

[Das Outsider]

It is something of a joke--and a truism--today that Ukrainians are very tough, fierce people. Surviving Hitler, Stalin, and the fallout of the U.S.S.R., I'd have to agree.

These things need to be brought to light. To us, the sheer multitudes slaughtered in the name of State-as-God in the first half of the last century are almost unimaginable, except in the cushy and impersonal realm of numbers and figures.

[rmlew]

It is very sad. the Soviets wanted to hide both the Nazi Holocaust and the Soviet Holdomir.
For Ukranians it is difficult because much of Western Ukraine was part of Poland (Galicia). In the ethnic divide (Poles, Ukrainians, Jews), the Nazis sided with Ukranians in Galcia/Haliz and many Ukrainians gleefully joined in killing Jews and stealing property. Furthermore after the war, the Poles who didn't leave voluntarily were pushed out. This included many Polish-Jews such as my family.

I am thankful for your posting this article. It prompted me to do a web search, where I finally discovered the names of the German officer and the Polish-German conscript who saved my father's family when the Drohobycz ghetto was set for liquidation.

[Loud Mime]

The left doesn’t want these modern days matters addressed for a reason: they embrace hatred the same way that the executioners of old did. They don’t hate a person, they hate their entire political movement.

[arthurus]

The Left determined long ago that it is easier to kill the holders of inconvenient views than it is to convert them and, with no transcendant God, there is no problem with conscience and it is easier to pacify one's necessary population base by demonizing another ethnicity than by rational discourse. Our own Left demnonizes the political opposition, Bush, Rove, Halliburton, etc., because it is not possible to prevail in rational argument. Actual questions and differences of policy are hardly spoken of beyond slogans. The policy questions revolve primarily around whose policy it is not so much the content of the policy. Thus Lenin's question, "Who? Whom?" rather than What? How? They hate the war because it is Bush's War.

Before the 1960s the Democrat Party was a liberal, mildly socialist organization that believed in defending the Nation. By 1980 the whole party had shed its Reagan Conservatives and defense-minded liberals and was-and is- a hard left party more akin to the old European Social Democrats(out of which sprang the Russian Bolsheviks)hat does not believe in Nation at all. They are very much The Left and they see no enemies to the left. That makes them pretty much captive to the leftmost elements of an already very left party.

[eleni121]

The Nazis were killing Jews and the Commies were killing Ukrainians...and Greeks and Serbians...and Romanians...and Russians ...

By the tens of millions.

[Coleus]

Death by Government is responsible for more killing than any war.

[eleni121]

Especially when government’s purpose is to make war on its people.

[Pelham]

“These things need to be brought to light. To us, the sheer multitudes slaughtered in the name of State-as-God in the first half of the last century are almost unimaginable, except in the cushy and impersonal realm of numbers and figures.”

You’ll find these Soviet crimes well described in the books of Robert Conquest.