Yahad in Unum

Nazi atrocities against the Jews are most famous in the concentration camps, but the Wall Street Journal reports on a Catholic priest who has devoted his life to investigating them in his native Ukraine:

Using forensic evidence, eyewitness accounts and archival research, Father Desbois has taken it upon himself to document the murders of Jews after the Nazis invaded the former Soviet Union. In Ukraine, where he has begun his work, these Jews were not killed in the relatively well-documented machinery of the death camps. They were the victims of mobile killing units that shot their captives and deliberately left few records of their crimes. At each location, according to Father Desbois, local Ukrainians, including hundreds of children, were requisitioned at gunpoint to assist with the logistics of murder. In August 1941, for instance, these death squads were killing an estimated 82 Jews every hour.

The entire article is worth reading, even if difficult to read. But I found Fr. Desbois’ reasons for why he catalogues the evil particularly interesting:

But this project that has become his life’s work, he says, is inspired by two sources far greater than either history or circumstance. One is “min hashamayim,” Father Desbois says in Hebrew—from heaven, which inspires us to build relationships with our fellow human beings. The other inspiration, he explains, comes from the earthly world, and what is written in Genesis about the blood of Abel, murdered by Cain: “The voice of your brother’s blood is crying to me from the ground.”

As the unmarked mass graves are slowly located, one by one, and sanctified with the recitation of the Kaddish, the Jewish prayer of mourning for the dead, the cries can at last be silenced. Are we our brothers’ keepers? To Father Desbois, the answer is a resounding “Yes.”

Even so, I ask him: How can you bear to listen to a woman talk about when she was 14 years old and was forced to walk on corpses, between shootings, in order to pack them down in a mass grave? “I keep my faith in God,” Father Desbois responds, “not in humanity.”