Patrick Desbois

Patrick Desbois (born June 26, 1955 in Chalon-sur-Saône , France ) is a Catholic priest and representative of the French Bishops' Conference for relations with Judaism and a consultant to the Vatican . Since 2004 he has been chairman of the organization Yahad - In Unum . Co-founders of this organization were the French cardinals Jean-Marie Lustiger , Philippe Barbarin and Jean-Pierre Ricard as well as Rabbi Israel Singer and Serge Cwajgenbaum from the World Jewish Congress .

His work with Yahad - In Unum

Patrick Desbois. May 2011.

The task of Yahad - In Unum is to better document the mass murder between 1941 and 1944 of the Jews in what is now Ukraine , Belarus , Russia , Romania , Poland , Moldova and Lithuania . The last surviving contemporary witnesses are questioned about the individual mass shootings and the mass graves are located, of which Desbois believes there are 1200 in Ukraine alone. The exact position of these mass graves is almost without exception unknown to today's Holocaust research . By 2007 he conducted over 700 interviews that were recorded and located 600 sites of graves, most of which were not yet documented. By 2009 there were over 1,000 such mass graves and over 3,500 contemporary witnesses. Desbois says:

“Under the ground everyone is in his place, which the hierarchy of the Third Reich provided for him ... (While Germans, including SS men) ... were reburied in magnificent cemeteries, there are only small graves for the French, white ones Stones under brambles for the anonymous Soviet soldiers and absolutely nothing for the Jews. "

In 2009, the German Foreign Office provided Yahad In Unum's research work with 500,000 euros.

Awards

• Jan Karski Award from the American Jewish Committee (2007)
• Person of the Year by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (2008)
• Knight of the Legion of Honor (2008)
• Friendship Prize between Jews and Christians in France (Prix de l'Amitié judéo-chrétienne en France) (2008)
• Awarded honorary doctorates from the Bar Ilan University in Ramat Gan and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, both Israel (2009)
• Award of the Primo Levi Prize, Rome (2010)
• Awarded an honorary doctorate from Yeshiva University in New York (2011)
• Awarded an honorary doctorate from New York University in New York (2012)
• Awarded an honorary doctorate from the University of Winnipeg in Canada (2013)
• Prize of the Conseil Représentatif des Institutions juives de France , France (2014)
• Awarded an honorary doctorate from the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York (2015)

Fonts

• with Husson, Edouard: New results on the history of the Holocaust in Ukraine. Yahad-In Unum's "Oral History" project and its scientific evaluation. In: Johannes Hürter (Ed.): Occupation, Collaboration, Holocaust. New studies on the persecution and murder of European Jews (series of the Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte 97), Oldenbourg, Munich 2008, ISBN 3-486-58728-5 - pp. 177–187.
• The forgotten holocaust. The murder of the Ukrainian Jews. A search for clues. Berlin Verlag, 2009, ISBN 3-827-00826-3 .

Press

• Süddeutsche Zeitung No. 43 of February 21, 2009, p. 15: The earth has been moving for days [1]
• jungle world No. 15 of April 9, 2009, supplement "Jungle", p. 10: In the forest on the Jews. A French priest goes in search of traces of the mass murder of the Jews in Ukraine [2]
• Der Spiegel No. 37 of September 7, 2009, p. 45: Fields of Remembrance [3]
• culture time December 9th, 2009: bones are everywhere. The forgotten Holocaust in Ukraine. [4] [5]

Web links

• personal website (English)
• Yahad - In Unum website (French / English)
• Review of the book "The Forgotten Holocaust" from February 14, 2009 in Die Welt
• Contribution from February 18, 2009 to Deutschlandradio Kultur
• Article from February 20, 2009 in the TAZ
• Desbois, Patrick: The forgotten Holocaust article from March 9, 2009 in the Wiener Zeitung (accessed November 8, 2013)

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Elaine Sciolino: A Priest helps Ukrainians recall "Holocaust of Bullets" , in: The New York Times , October 2007
2. ↑ The Forgotten Holocaust. The murder of the Ukrainian Jews. A search for clues. Berlin Verlag 2009. pp. 51–52.
3. ↑ Jan Philipp Sternberg: Condemned to watch. (PDF) In: “Not a word was in the history books ...” European memories of 70 years of the beginning of the war. n-ost Network for Eastern Europe Reporting, Berlin, September 2009, pp. 14–19 , accessed on December 18, 2015 .