Backstory: A priest's crusade on Holocaust

The confessions that Father Patrick Desbois receives don't come from his parishioners. They are not made behind closed doors. They don't even come from his countrymen. The words the French priest hears are the unburdening of villagers from Ukraine – the last witnesses to the mass killing of Jews in a little-known part of the Holocaust more than 60 years ago.

He recounts one story – just one of a thousand he's heard – of a Ukrainian woman who was ordered by Nazi soldiers to cook them dinner. As they ate, the 25 Germans went out in pairs to kill Jews. By the time the meal was over, they had shot 1,200. It was the first time the woman had ever told the story. "These people want absolutely to speak before they die," says Father Desbois of the bystanders. "They want to say the truth."

Father Patrick Desbois has become one of the world's foremost chroniclers of what the French call the Shoah par Balles – the Holocaust of bullets. Though neither Jewish nor Ukrainian, he spends half his year combing the poverty-stricken landscape of Ukraine to document the annihilation of tens of thousands of Jews at the hands of traveling bands of Nazis called the Einsatzgruppen.

It is a self-appointed task that led the Israeli newspaper Haaretz to decree him "Patrick the Saint." Embarrassed, Desbois calls the characterization a midrash – Hebrew for exaggeration.

The priest, who has devoted his clerical life to fighting anti-Semitism, is uncovering, village by village, unmarked mass graves from the Holocaust era. Here the Jews were shot, one by one, mother in front of child, child in front of father.

The "Holocaust of bullets" was every bit as brutal as the extermination of Jews by gas chamber, starvation, and other means at Auschwitz and elsewhere in Europe. Yet the depth and details of the tragedy in Ukraine have only recently surfaced.

In the local villages, teenagers and children were forced to help dig graves, pull gold teeth from the mouths of neighbors, and take piles of clothes away as their friends shivered, awaiting death. These children, now old men and women, have never been asked about what they saw, what they were forced to see. Never, that is, until they meet a humble priest walking through their woods in his clerical collar.

"This is very, very important," says Edouard Husson, a historian at the Sorbonne in Paris and a project consultant. The originality of Desbois's work is that "he was the first to have the idea to talk to the Ukrainian witnesses – the bystanders."

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In his early 20s, as he crept toward a life of faith, Desbois was dogged by a question: "What does God want me to do?" Little did he know then, in the mid-1970s, that he would eventually answer that for himself by becoming a human bridge between the modern Jewish world and the Catholic Church and a major conduit through which the Holocaust would be remembered.

Desbois's journey to the woods of Ukraine is rooted in an unusual faith, an expansive humanity, and a personal tie. He was born in Burgundy, France, in 1955 to a family deeply affected by the German occupation. Two of his cousins were deported by the Nazis. His grandfather, like 25,000 other French soldiers, was held at a camp on the border of Poland, Ukraine, and Russia. "We felt ourselves to be in the same story as the Jews," says Desbois. Yet his grandfather always said his internment was not nearly as awful as it was for "the others."

Desbois studied mathematics and spent several years teaching in the West African nation of Burkina Faso. At 21, he joined Mother Teresa for three months in Calcutta, caring for the dying. When he decided to make his life in the church, his secular-minded family was horrified.

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