Re: FW: [Cz-L] "holocaust by bullets"

Tonight on NBC television this story was aired. I only heard part of it
while at a noisy restaurant that had a television playing. I believe it refers to
the holocaust in Transnistria. This information can be found at
 
(http://dailynightly.msnbc.msn.com/archive/2008/01/23/584821.aspx)

   - Eytan Fichman
 
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Uncovering the past
Posted: Wednesday, January 23, 2008 3:42 AM by Barbara Raab

By Marisa Buchanan, NBC News producer
There is a public reason French Catholic priest Father Patrick Desbois gives
about why he has worked so tirelessly for seven years uncovering a
little-known part of the holocaust during World War Two. "Pope John Paul II said to
the Jews, 'We are brothers,'" Father Desbois told Ann Curry, "but when you are
brothers, you have to help your brothers. And I cannot accept that my
brothers are laying the fields of a Christian country."
There is also a more private reason that he reveals to Ann in her piece
tonight on Nightly News.

We traveled to Paris late in December to look at the exhibition of Father
Desbois's work at the Memorial de Shoah. There are over 600 eyewitness
accounts that Father Debois and his team at Yad In Unum have gathered in remote
parts of the Ukraine. These are memories long locked away. As one holocaust
expert told me, these villages have been practically hermetically sealed since the
war. These eyewitnesses don't talk about what they saw, and they have not
had access to the vast dialogue and research about the Holocaust the way many
of us have. There are no memorials and no museums.
Strikingly different from what most people know about the holocaust--the
hidden gas chambers and the work camps--these atrocities were not hidden from
the public.
Many people saw this "holocaust by bullets" firsthand. Many of the children
who saw them or were forced to participate, grew up without ever discussing
the subject again. They live only a few miles from where the atrocities took
place. So not until Father Desbois asks a simple question. "Were you here
during the war?" do they often slowly reveal what they know.
There are so many stories uncovered for the first time in village after
village: old men and women, who Father Desbois says are now "destroyed" from one
day in their life so many years ago. They relive the traumatic moments in
detail.

Desbois told Ann in the interview, "These people for one day, they have been
implicated in the genocide. And they want to speak before to die. Now they
are 75, sometime 91. They say, 'We don't want to finish our life without
speaking'."
The memories come pouring out. One woman said she had to run across bodies
in a mass grave to push them down . Another man remembers being forced to
collect sunflowers to burn the corpses. It goes on and on. Desbois ask them, how
far away were you standing? How far away were the men with the guns from the
Jews? Did they play music? How many hours did it last? And on and on. People
often say its too difficult to look back at this tragedy but Father
Desbois's words in his interview lingered with the NBC News team.
"What is too difficult? To look at it or to be killed?" What is really
difficult? What was difficult in Cambodia? To look at it or to be killed? What is
difficult in Bosnia? What is difficult in Rwanda? To be killed or to know it?
And if you don't know it, other people will say, 'Okay, if you don't want to
listen, we can kill other people'.
Editor's note: Ann Curry's report airs tonight on the broadcast.
 



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Received on 2008-01-24 04:10:00