Photograph: © Oliver O'Hanlon

“We will never be silenced”

- Father Patrick Desbois

 

On April 21, 2009, Father Desbois delivered a speech on Holocaust Remembrance Day,  alongside Bernard-Henri Lévy, Élie Wiesel and Nathan Chtcharanskyon.  The speech was part of the UN racism conference held in Geneva, “Durban II.”  Below is a text of the speech 

Speech by Patrick Desbois

President of Yahad-In Unum

For over five years, Yahad-In Unum ,“Together” in Hebrew and in Latin, has been traveling to Belarus and Ukraine to look for the mass graves of Jews and gypsies executed between 1941 and 1944 by units of the Third Reich.

The Ukrainian and Belarusian neighbors of these murdered Jews want to speak they pass on. They had been requisitioned by the Nazis to dig ditches, early in the morning, to transport the Jews from the village to the ditch in horse-drawn carts, and to fill ditches when the Jews were, quite often, no more than hurt by the gunfire.

Yahad-In Unum has found over 850 extermination sites, most of which were unknown, and confirmed the proof from ballistics, archives, and oral accounts, that shows, without a doubt, that these women, children, elderly people were shot in Ukraine and in Belarus, solely because they were Jews. In Bodgdanivka, there is a grave contains over 42,000 Jews.

More than two million Jews were killed like animals and buried like animals in ditches, behind the churches, in parks. 

It was the Holoaust by Bullets

A week ago I was in Belarus with my team. Ivan, 78 years old, recounted:

“Each time the Nazis murdered Jewish families in the Brest Ghetto, we, the Soviet prisoners, were forced to pack the goods of the Jews in large wooden crates to auction off at the market. We had to place in each crate a pair of shoes, a dress, some jewelry, then close the crate. After the total extermination of the Ghetto, we had to have several trucks come by to bring the cases of Jewish goods to the town market.”

The poor Eastern people want us to know today that an entire continent was transformed into a continent of extermination.

Hanna, trembling, her eyes lowered, murmurs:

“I was forced to walk on the bodies of Jews after each shooting to make space in the grave. Then my class of young Jewish girls arrived. They fired. I had to walk on them like the others.”

We found over 900 Ukrainian or Belarusian witnesses present at the shootings of the Jews.

Why does Yahad-In Unum sacrifice its energy to find the graves of Jews killed in the Holocaust by Bullets? 

First of all, to give them dignity and so they can finally receive a Kaddish. They were killed like animals and buried like beasts. Today, thieves quite often open the graves to look for gold teeth.

But also, because today, on our planet, there are some individuals and groups that create propaganda that pretends that the Holocaust never existed, that it’s a lie to justify the birth of the State of Israel. Denial is not an intellectual position. There is no denial without anti-Semitism. Denial odiously tries to remove all legitimacy from the Jewish people.

Certain deniers pretend to be Catholic, others govern Iran, all come from the same tradition. Denial is a heritage of Himmler and Heydrich, who, in July 1942, decided to dig up and burn the bodies of Jews shot during the secret operation called 1005. Operation 1005 was the headquarters of the deniers.

Let’s not forget! The first denial was a denial from inferno. At Yahad-In Unum, we work together not for tomorrow, but for after tomorrow when the survivors will be rare among us.

We work so that the world knows that there were men and women who wanted to create a world by eradicating from the Earth the people of the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.

The Holocaust was the black fruit of anti-Semitism.

“Anti-Semitism is a sin against God and against Humanity,” quoted Pope John Paul II.

Unfortunately, a sin never dies. Many want our voices to be silenced.

We will never be silenced, for the blood of Olga, shot at four years old in Simferopol, of Itzrik, shot at seven years old in Busk, of Edip, shot at 16 years old in Tarnopil, the blood of Abel murdered by Cain never ceases to cry to Heaven. We do not want to, we cannot, condemn the children murdered during the Holocaust to silence; we do not want to, we cannot create a modern world on the thousands of unknown mass graves of murdered Jews.

We do not want to, we cannot, build the world asking Abel to be silent.