Word: mass
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...divulge details. But when the priest returned a year later, the deputy mayor, Yaroslav Nadiak, led him to the forest of Borowe outside the town and revealed what Rava-Ruska's townsfolk had long known: that some 1,500 Jews had been shot and hastily buried in a mass grave there in November 1943. "He told me: 'Patrick, I could take you to a hundred villages like this,'" says Desbois. "And I said...
...than that, and Desbois admits he had little idea of the huge task he had set himself when he began his full-time research in 2004. In 15 trips to Ukraine, the 52-year-old priest has since located more than 750 killing sites, some of which contain several mass graves, and he now suspects there may be another 1,800 graves scattered across the country. Ukraine's graves - many of them just depressions in the ground, suggesting the weight of hundreds of bodies - were neglected through decades of Soviet rule. Now, with many of the Holocaust's witnesses...
Historians have long known that the Holocaust involved mass executions, as well as concentration camps. Yet despite the mountain of literature, films and photographs documenting the Holocaust, Desbois has filled in a crucial missing piece of history by interviewing hundreds of people who witnessed the Ukrainian killings firsthand. "The testimony is just unbelievable," says Paul Shapiro, director of research for the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, which is honoring Desbois at a dinner in the capital in April. The Simon Wiesenthal Center, a Jewish-rights organization in Los Angeles, is awarding Desbois a Medal of Valor...
...burn the corpses in the forests in a hurried attempt to erase the evidence before Germany's retreat from Ukraine in 1944. "Columns of smoke rose until we could barely breathe," said Wislowski, describing the massive burning program. Historians believe about 90,000 people lie in more than 40 mass graves tucked among the trees of the Lisinichi Forest, including hundreds of Italian soldiers killed by the Nazis after Italy surrendered to the Allied forces...
...Although Jews were overwhelmingly the largest group of victims, the Nazis also shot tens of thousands of Gypsies, as well as Polish and Soviet citizens and Italian soldiers. A 26-year-old Ukrainian translator for Desbois said she knew of those deaths, but was astonished to learn about the mass killing of Jews when she met the priest last year...