“We have been waiting for you:” uncovering buried Ukrainian secrets
Patrick Desbois is a French priest with a special calling: he has dedicated himself to documenting the mass murders of Ukrainian Jews by the Nazis during World War II, committed in the days before the efficiency of gas chamber and oven had replaced the messier business of bullet and pit.
Father Desbois knows that, although most of these estimated million and a half deaths are undocumented, there were witnesses—villagers who watched and remembered. The very young among them are old now, but they are able to lead the inquisitive priest to the places where the unmarked graves lie, waiting.
The death camps have received far more publicity, but the Nazis managed to kill a huge number of Jews in Ukraine, where the bulk of Russian Jewry lived, an inheritance from a Polish past. This is where the famous Babi Yar pits were located, subject of Yevtushenko’s brave poem.
The Nazis were determined to leave no witnesses. But even at Babi Yar and many other scenes of execution and horror, a few people survived by sustaining nonfatal injuries, playing dead, and lying among the pile of bodies to crawl out later:
One of the most often-cited parts of Kuznetsov’s documentary novel [on Babi Yar] is the testimony of Dina Pronicheva, an actress of Kiev Puppet Theater. She was one of those ordered to march to the ravine, forced to undress, and then shot. Severely wounded, she played dead in a pile of corpses, and eventually managed to escape. She was one of the very few survivors of the massacre; she later related her horrifying story to Kuznetsov.
Desbois interviews the other surviving witnesses, those who were neither perpetrators nor victims, but onlookers. Of course, in a way, you might say they were victims, as well—young children or teenagers who were secret watchers of scenes of almost unimaginable horror, leaving them with dreadful memories for all these decades, and feeling somehow complicit in events over which they had no control.
And that is why so many of them greet Father Desbois with a sense of great relief. He is not there to judge, but to witness the witnesses, who have been silent far too long about their terrible burden:
“People talk as if these things happened yesterday, as if 60 years didn’t exist,” Father Desbois said. “Some ask, ”˜Why are you coming so late? We have been waiting for you.’”
You might ask why they’ve not spoken up sooner, if they wanted to so very much? I can only answer that shame is often the psychological experience of children in such situations, and silence is shame’s companion. A priest can help them transcend that feeling, opening mouths that lead to uncovering the location of graves and reclaiming a terrible past.
Here’s an interesting tidbit from the piece:
“Unlike in Poland and Germany, where the Holocaust remains visible through the searing symbols of the extermination camps, the horror in Ukraine was hidden away, first by the Nazis, then by the Soviets.”
Nice posting! Have a great weekend!
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I do nt think it is shame that promotes silence so often. I believe it is fear and denial mixed with guilt. The horror of the Nazis spread beyond just german guilt and reached the Hungarians, the Poles, even the Dutch of Ann Frank’s world, the Italians, the French and of course the Arabs who in the irony of ironies greeted the antisemitc Germans. Even Churchill, asked by Eichmann to trade trucks for some huge numbers of Jews–I can’t recall if it was 100,000 or 1,000,000 and it does not matter much–said something like, “what would I do with 1 million Jews. The shame of the silence of the Ukraine is the shame of the silence of the world.
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You’d think that Father Desbois would get more recognition for his efforts. A good man doing good work.
You’d think maybe the Buddhist monks of Myanmar might get the Nobel Prize this year.
You might, but you’d be wrong. No we get pages of drivel about Paris Hilton’s latest sorry exploits and Al Gore being a likely candidate for the Nobel Prize. Which I guess, tells you what the Nobel Prize and all that publicity are worth.
Thanks for paying attention to this shameful event in Russian history. I was touched by this shame through the experiences of my Ukranian wife, whose inability to identify with her Jewish heritage only disappeared after coming to the U.S. to live. Yes, it is one of the terrible consequences of 20th c. Bolshevism.
See the video: “Everything is revealed.” It starts as a comedy and uncovers just such a mass murder in The Ukraine.
Israel’s proxy war against Iran
Islamic Republic of Iran’s lobby in the U.S.
More info on how this lobby operates:
http://iranianlobby.com/
“You might, but you’d be wrong. No we get pages of drivel about Paris Hilton’s latest sorry exploits and Al Gore being a likely candidate for the Nobel Prize. Which I guess, tells you what the Nobel Prize and all that publicity are worth.”
We also get tons of stories about how Bush and the Republicans are just like the Nazi’s. Remember when these people are saying such things what they are comparing the US (and most of the western civilization) too – are they that stupid or that blind?
In either case it speak VERY badly of those that equate us to them.
Besides, when Yassar Arafat won the Nobel Peace Price that should have been when what you express became apparent – the current contenders are no where near as much hypocrisy as that is. It is only worth anything within that insular culture and they can only do so much before people realize they are idiots (though the cycle from Prophet to Idiot seems to be repeated every few years after their policies screw everything/everyone).
People that witnessed horrible events always try to suppress such memories. My father never told me about Red Army atrocities in Germany, this was too painful to him; and my father-in-law, a German national, who was in so called Labour Army in Siberia (a prison camp, where all German nationals were interned during war) also never told anything about this period. Exceptions are extremely rare.