To Toronto Star | 12Oct2010 | Orest Slepokura
Uncovering the hidden Holocaust
Martin Regg Cohn:
Re: "Uncovering the hidden Holocaust," Toronto Star, 12 October 2010.
In the film Lawrence of Arabia, one episode portrays Lawrence leading a
band of fighters crossing the desert and using the element of surprise
to capture the Turkish-held port of Aqaba. The Turks' big guns had been
bolted down to face the sea to defend it from attack by the British
Navy; hence they were useless against the fighters streaming in from
the desert behind it.
That's how I see the Holocaust story: With its big guns bolted down
facing the sea to fend off the "Holocaust deniers," ready to blast them
out of the water. But meanwhile Hollywood and the Quentin Tarantinos,
Oprah with her billboards hoisted up above Sunset Boulevard mawkishly
proclaiming "Oprah Goes to Auschwitz," hoaxers looking to score with
bogus memoirs, and on and on are consecutively and concurrently
debauching the traditional Holocaust narrative and Weimar-izing its
moral currency.
When you read a movie review in the newspaper's entertainment pages
calling Inglourious Basterds "a Jewish wet dream" and when
the phrase "Holocaust comedy" is no longer an oxymoron, you can
reasonably expect that a soft-core Holocaust porn flick, with
S&M in 3D, will, before this decade is out, make a splash at
the Cannes Film Festival. (Say, wasn't that what the Night Porter was
about?)
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Toronto Star | 12Oct2010 | Martin Regg Cohn
http://www.thestar.com/Opinion/EditorialOpinion/article/873171
Cohn: Uncovering the hidden Holocaust
Stark images of human skeletons in mass graves. Video testimony about
mass executions. Then a jarring speech from the man in a clerical
collar.
The questions from the floor are unexpected: One after another, people
ask Father Patrick Desbois why he doesn’t take his Holocaust message
further afield.
On this night, in this synagogue, his Jewish audience seemed to be
telling this Catholic priest that he was preaching to the converted. In
plaintive tones, they asked him to broaden his reach -- exposing more
non-Jews to his harrowing account of Eastern Europe’s hidden Holocaust.
In an age of Holocaust denial, with Iran’s Mahmoud Ahmadinejad
disdaining the evidence, they beseeched him to get his message out
beyond the walls of their synagogue. Many in the hall had survived the
genocide that claimed 6 million Jews, and already knew the details in
their bones.
One of them was my mother. She had been following the priest’s work
from a distance, but now wanted to hear his story in person. And then
share her own.
History had brought them together: her birthplace, in Rawa-Ruska, on
the Polish-Ukrainian border; and his life’s work in that same small
railway town.
As Desbois told the audience, his grandfather had been held in
Rawa-Ruska as a captured French soldier in a Nazi prisoner-of-war camp.
But he’d always told the young Desbois that “others” had suffered far
more. It was a telltale clue that launched the priest’s lifelong
obsession with the fate of the 10,000 Jews slaughtered in the vicinity
of Rawa-Ruska.
Desbois went to Rawa-Ruska in 2002 to see for himself, but found
nothing visible: The local mayor kept running interference, insisting
there were no traces of mass graves. Yet Desbois knew from his own
upbringing in rural France that villagers always know where the bodies
are buried. He returned year after year, until a new mayor took power
and provided the key that unlocked Rawa-Ruska’s dark secret.
He was led to a mass grave for the last 1,500 Jews of Rawa-Ruska. It
became ground zero for his research as he fanned out across Ukraine.
Interviewing witnesses, the priest says little but listens closely,
allowing his clerical collar to loosen people’s tongues in the heavily
Catholic countryside. But the encounters are not especially priestly;
no one ever asks him to take confession, even when confessing to the
most heinous acts.
He uses teams of forensic and ballistics experts, translators and
diggers. And more recently, bodyguards, due to death threats from
Holocaust deniers -- the fallout from getting his message out.
Despite the denials, it remains one of the best-documented events of
recent history. And yet Desbois continues to uncover new details about
killing fields that had seemed lost forever.
To date, Desbois has uncovered more than 500 mass graves across Ukraine
and Belarus, aided by Soviet archives and new testimony from nearly 800
eyewitnesses. The forensic, ballistic and human evidence adds up to
what Desbois calls a “Holocaust by bullets” -- a grim epilogue to the
traditional narrative of gas chambers and concentration camps.
After his talk last week, Desbois listened patiently to audience
members who mobbed him at the podium, still asking about mass graves in
distant villages. One of them was my 84-year-old mother, who made her
way past the crowds to tell the priest that she was one of the last
living survivors from Rawa-Ruska -- the town of his grandfather’s
internment, and my own grandparents’ death.
Fearing the worst, my grandparents had made arrangements to smuggle my
mother out of Rawa-Ruska. She obtained false papers identifying her as
a Catholic teenager -- one of many who survived the war in Nazi Germany
until the Russians liberated them.
We don’t know how my grandparents perished. Nothing more was heard from
them after late 1942, when they last wrote to my mother. Did they die
of typhus, brought on by the inhuman conditions Jews were subjected to
by the Nazi occupiers? Or in the killing fields that Desbois has
documented?
It is a story still without answers. But a story no Holocaust denier
can take away from us.