In Broad Daylight

by Father Patrick Desbois

  A child of public schools, I devoured all the knowledge and opportunities that were offered me, for free, by my country, my republic, the France that I so loved. I went from school to the public arts center, from the poems of Prévert to the songs of Jacques Brel, from the public libraries to the university. I studied mathematics with a passion.

  Thirty years have passed.

  I have never forgotten the fault line between the wrong side and the right side. Perhaps I have never left it. I couldn’t fathom, in my youth, how much being born in the world’s backstage would inform my entire life, how the wrong side would shape my quest.

  Thirty years have passed.

  Faith in God struck me like lightning one Friday while I was studying for my exams in mathematics at the university in Dijon. It happened in the middle of campus. I, the militant atheist, fully conscious, felt myself suddenly overtaken by a certainty, a crazy and unacceptable certainty: God existed. For years afterward, I asked myself what he wanted from me.

  I hesitated for a long time between becoming a Protestant or Catholic.

  My work with Mother Teresa in Calcutta played a decisive role. After having studied mathematics, theology, and history, I became a priest. As my superior at the seminary would say to the other priests, “Don’t forget, he wasn’t made in our house, in the Church!”

  Having belonged to the world of the little people has given me a specific sensibility. To this day, in restaurants I remain fascinated by the clear, cold line that separates the space of the clients from that of the waitstaff. On the other side of the kitchen door is a different world. There are no more decorations, often; just sad tiles, noisy plates, and anonymous hands washing dishes.

  But the transparent cleaning women and the bellhops do see all of our habits and our faults. They move between the wrong side and the right side. Their clients pay to ignore this, to buy into an illusory world, a theater set, where for an hour or two they can leave real life, and the shadows who people it, in the wings. Perhaps these clients can even forget, through disdain or habit, that they are living a spectacle.

  My family wasn’t even sure of being on the right side’s other side. Rather, we had the feeling of existing behind the scenery.

  In 1940, fifteen years before I was born, my family found itself caught in the wings of History with a capital H, the history of the war. Our farm was first requisitioned by the Maquis, the French Resistance, and then it was taken over by the Germans.

  At that time, my Desbois grandparents lived on the island of Saint-Laurent, between the Saône and the Genise Rivers. Marie-Louise, my paternal grandmother, lived less than a hundred yards from the dividing line separating occupied from “free” France.

  Victorine, my other grandmother, found herself, like many French women at the time, the sole caretaker of both the farm and the family. She had to figure out how to face all the challenges of those who refused to accept the German fascists’ occupation. Fernande, my mother, told us of having hidden vats of flour under the armoires when the Communists came to look for food and of later being terrified when the Germans smashed the same armoires with their rifle butts searching for Communists!

  From her stories, we understood everything, perhaps too much.

  The farm had become a hideout as well as an anti-aircraft site. The anti-aircraft batteries of the Resistance, installed twenty yards from our kitchen door, took out two German aircraft, which fell into our fields. Our farm buildings were transformed into interrogation rooms and prison cells for collaborators. The German pilots who were caught and tortured in our stable—or, more precisely, in our pigsty—were buried on our land. I still don’t know where. The Alsatian refugees who came to us from the train station slept on our second floor.

  Some neighbors denounced us. There have always been such souls in difficult times. The Germans, of course, came to reclaim their own. My grandmother stopped a violent search of the house at the risk of incurring the Germans’ wrath and causing hostages—that is, the men of the hamlet—to be shot. This was one of the ways her Christian responsibility manifested itself. She was forever marked by it, conscious not only of history, big and small, but also of the fact that there are days when one has to stand firm. She was, by turns, a servant and a combatant.

  I was born ten years after the end of the war. Yet it was as though I had two sets of memories, those of a simple farmhand and those of all the little people who had dared to say no before me. Once the war was over, the worldwide performance ended. The cadavers were forgotten. But my family could never quite return to the wings like before, like the others. The past stuck to our boots like clay.

  It is surely this childhood perspective, so damaged by the noise from the machines of war occupying our fields, that led me later to other fields in Ukraine. But even more than the sound, it is the silence. The silence of Claudius, my grandfather whom I loved so much. He was a short, stocky man, a joker, his dark blue beret firmly on his head, a Gitane cigarette stuck behind his ear, and always a blue apron with big pockets. He was the family comedian, at least in appearance. The cheerful one, like Edith Piaf’s sad clown, making everyone around him laugh.

  But he got quiet whenever anyone brought up his wartime past. Joking stopped as soon as someone pronounced the forbidden words: Rawa Ruska.2 The site of his deportation in 1942. Camp 325.3

  As a child at family meals, I would press him, not understanding the reasons for his silences. His wife, Marie-Louise, would leave the table, her glasses fogged. Eventually, I stopped trying to bring it up. But one early morning, in our all-purpose van as we left Chalon to go buy Bresse chickens at various farms, I asked him one more time, “What did you do at Rawa Ruska? Why don’t you talk about it?” We were alone that day. Gravely, he offered me these few words: “Patrick, we were locked in a camp with nothing to drink, we ate grass and dandelions, but outside the camp, for the others, it was worse.”

  Then we drove in silence for a long time. His words are etched in me now like the topographical map of an impossible memory, the equation, the topology of an enigma that has become my own: “Outside, for the others, it was worse.” But who were “the others”? And at Rawa Ruska, where was this “outside”?

  A few months before his death, knowing he was going to leave this world, Claudius, who was sitting at the head of the kitchen table in his little apartment on Saint-Laurent, asked me, “What are you going to do when I die?” Chuckling, I answered, “Inherit!” He burst out laughing; so did I. I had learned with him to laugh at everything, even when you are crying inside. Even when you are dying.

  On that day, I did not gauge the true weight of my response. I was inheriting. Inheriting silence.

  Much later, in Paris, I met René Chevalier—Maurice’s nephew4—himself a survivor of Rawa Ruska, Camp 325, and we decided to “return” there.

  Early one morning, we walked through the village, which was slowly awakening from the Soviet ice age. I found the French internment camp virtually unchanged. Empty acres with scattered buildings here and there. A Soviet barracks had been built on the site, and one of its walls was painted entirely with scenes from a legend of the Red Army. Farther along, on the outskirts of the town, under thick brambles, we managed to find immense concrete slabs under which most of the 25,000 murdered Soviet prisoners were buried. They were no longer honored in this Ukraine, which by then had declared its independence.

  According to the archives, more than 15,000 Jews were shot at Rawa Ruska proper.

  We asked everywhere: at the church, at the central market, at city hall. Absolutely no one in Rawa Ruska wanted to talk about Jews. It was the same silence I had known at home growing up, the same leaden lid.

  I went to see the mayor, a Soviet, who told me he knew nothing, that the executions were secret. In his little gray second-floor office, he said to me: “Vive la France, vive Ukraine!” waving two little faded flags. I went downstairs thinking I would never find the common graves of the Jews.

  Thank God, that mayor los
t the next election. A new mayor, Yaroslaw, was elected, someone I already knew slightly through my translator, Svetlana.

  I was tired of finding nothing. I was lingering at a table at a wedding banquet in a restaurant called Hermès, whose ceiling had been painted by the mayor’s wife, when a stranger walked in and came up to me with the words, “They’re waiting for you.” I didn’t get up from the table, thinking, I’ve been waiting too, and for a long time, for over thirty years. The same person came back a few minutes later with the same enigmatic words, “They’re waiting for you.” Finally, I got up and went outside the building, which was as gray as the weather. A black car with tinted windows was waiting for me. I could see in the driver’s seat the impassive silhouette of the new mayor, Yaroslaw.

  As I approached the car, how could I possibly know that it wasn’t just the new mayor who was waiting for me? And that not only the 15,000 Jews murdered in Rawa Ruska were waiting but the hundreds of thousands, the millions of Jews and Gypsies, who had been abandoned in the bushes? All these, along with thousands of their ex-Soviet neighbors, who were ready to speak.

  The car left the center of town on a dirt road, followed a sleepy river, and crossed the long hamlet of Borove. Suddenly, at the end of Borove’s deserted main street, I saw more than fifty elderly peasants, very poor, standing at the edge of the village, supporting themselves on wooden sticks. I began to realize who was waiting for me that day: the ones who had helped in the murder of the Jews of Rawa Ruska in 1943. As soon as they saw our vehicle, they walked into the forest in silence, in a slow procession, as if for a burial, their animals following on leashes. We got out and followed them. One had a newspaper stuffed in his boots; another had a white goat on the end of a string.

  They led us to the site of a long-hidden common grave. And then they began to speak. One told of the arrival of the Germans, another of the Jews who dug the graves. And then each one left, heavy of foot, alone, weeping.

  I felt a “Finally” open within me. I felt like a tired boat coming into port after a long crossing. When evening had fallen, at the end of the stories, I found myself alone in the forest with Yaroslaw. It all could have ended there. Mission accomplished, Claudius. I found them. The others!

  I started toward the dirt road where our car was waiting for us. That’s when Yaroslaw pronounced these words: “Patrick, what I have done for one village I can do for one hundred villages.”

  I immediately said yes.

  I said yes like a gong ringing in the cold air of a country whose ditches are full of the dead. This wasn’t the first time my life’s course had been decided in just a few minutes. I said yes the way you jump on the train of Providence, without knowing why or how.

  Back in Paris, I rushed to rue Barbet-de-Jouy to see Cardinal Lustiger,5 who told me, “I know the story. My Polish Jewish family was shot in the same way.”

  I went to Madison Avenue in New York to meet Israel Singer, who at that time was the director of the World Jewish Congress. After I told him of my long hours in Rawa Ruska, he said in Hebrew to his right-hand man, “We’ve been searching for these graves since 1944 and this guy we don’t even know, he finds them.” He didn’t know I speak Hebrew.

  Singer, Lustiger, and I met several months later in a Jewish school in Evry. We began to put together a plan. We needed a structure. We would call it “Yahad,” together. And “In Unum,” as one, added Lustiger.

  Ten years on, there are more than twenty people who work with us in Paris, Washington, and Cologne. Some are university students, finishing their doctorates. Some are translators or investigators in the archives as well as in the villages. All of them, with the exception of me, are young. All are animated by the same conviction: to find every last mass grave of Jews or Gypsies shot by the Nazis.

  What a wager! What folly! To want to build a world of democratic nations that are no longer constructed on top of the mass graves of “others.”

  In order to find the graves in “a hundred villages” and many more, we had to cross-reference archives with the words of those who knew, who had witnessed. They were still alive, but not for long. There were many of these neighbors to the crime, though at first we didn’t know it. But after more than four thousand interviews at the time of this writing, it has become clear that the Shoah by bullets in Eastern Europe was not the secret we have been led to believe for so long. Rather, many people—Ukrainians and Poles, especially—saw it all with their own eyes and sometimes did more. How, after all, do you organize mass death without manpower? How do you keep up a certain rhythm of mass murder without the participation, whether voluntary or forced, of the villagers who have the misfortune to live near the Jews? Who built the ghettos, rounded up the future victims, and dug and then filled the graves? In short, who were the “helping hands” in the crime?

  In order to know, we had to understand how the crime took place, the process by which it became concretely possible. This book does not claim to retrace a typical day—no such record exists—but instead attempts to describe how, from the day before a mass murder to the day after it, events would unfold, each time according to a veritable “agenda” on the part of the criminals.

  PART ONE

  THE NIGHT BEFORE

  Chapter 1

  THE ARCHITECT

  Paris, June 7, 2013,

  the National Audiovisual Institute, at a colloquium of the

  National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS)

  Today’s meeting bears directly on our work.

  It’s exactly 9:00 a.m. Since I arrived too early, I’m pacing on the damp, narrow sidewalk. Suddenly, a person appears, walking quickly, key in hand.

  The conference room is pleasant and looks out onto a bright patio. Denis Peschanski, the former head of the CNRS, arrives, jovial and bright-eyed. He will serve as moderator. A number of researchers, historians, psychologists, and sociologists have accepted our invitation to attend after having watched our interviews with the “neighbors” to the scene of the crime. Each attendee has prepared remarks. I most clearly remember Peschanski’s words. He explains, with a touch of humor, that my interview technique adheres to what he calls the “Smiley method.”

  “Before going to see a witness, George Smiley1 gathers all the information necessary to understand the essence of what this witness will say. He must know ninety percent of it. If he doesn’t start out with ninety percent and doesn’t dominate his witness from the outset, he’ll never obtain his missing ten percent and won’t even have the keys he needs to understand the missing ten percent.”

  Yes, I thought, he could be right. The 10 percent is the unknown, or rather the many unknowns in the equations I’m trying to name, to understand little by little as I dig through archives, attend university symposiums, and have meetings on farms.

  While Denis continues his presentation under the eye of the camera suspended from the ceiling, my thoughts take flight. I recognize myself in his argument. It’s true that often, as I’m walking tiredly through some forgotten village in the heart of these post-Soviet territories, I’m desperately searching for the missing 10 percent. My studies in mathematics at the University of Dijon taught me never to give up when confronting the unknown, but rather to persist in solving a complicated equation, one with several unknowns. It’s the same today. Mathematics, it would seem, has resisted Catholic theology.

  As I muse about the 10 percent, I’m struck by the memory of an angular face. It’s the face of Anton, a very fit old man I met in his farmyard in Bousk, a Galician village in Ukraine. I had already interviewed more than ten people in this pretty town, which lay alongside a seemingly dormant river. They had all brought up the town ghetto, explaining how they’d traded food for clothing with the Jews who had been shut inside. Some had witnessed various shootings from a hiding place in a barn. Through them, we were able to locate the gravesites, down below the Jewish cemetery, toward the river.

  One day, I met a former nationalist. He told me how during the war he worked every da
y in a lemonade factory inside the ghetto. As soon as I saw him standing in his yard, a knife in hand because he had just killed a chicken for Sunday dinner, I knew that, with him, I would find something. I would find the 10 percent we were missing in our understanding of the crimes against the Jews of Bousk.

  It was after our third interview, in the cool shade of his upland farm, that Anton revealed his truth to me. He found himself, in 1942, within the walls of the Bousk Gestapo, when he overheard a conversation. It was a phone call from Lemberg, the regional capital. As he remembered it, the purpose of the call was to decide the exact day to kill the Jews of Bousk. According to him, the caller had proposed selecting a precise date.

  After several long minutes, I asked him the question: In the end, how did they choose the execution date for the Jews in Bousk?

  Calmly, without batting an eye, he answered, “They were proposing something in the next two weeks; the local Gestapo chose the day that was most convenient.”

  That was it. Simply stated, but horrific in its banality. For the first time, here before me stood a neighbor who had witnessed the selection of the murder date: part of the 10 percent that had been nagging at me for years. For so long, I had asked myself who chose the day of the executions. At Bousk, the local Gestapo administration had settled it. This fact didn’t resolve everything, but it did undermine the myth that all was decided from on high.

  The 10 percent sometimes defies research, like a stone polished beneath the stream of time, to which nothing can attach. It remains elusive, even after years in the archives and many miles traveled through village after village, all in a quest for the missing piece.

  For example, I try to understand who coordinated the labor in the field or clearing that would become the crime scene. This is not an idle question. Every villager I have met remembers with precision the length, width, and depth of the common graves. In other words, the measurements of the killing machine adapted to the number of bodies of its Jewish victims. But who calculates the cubic volume of the dead? Who coldly does the math to find the correct amount of space for the number of living Jews on the verge of being murdered? This question gnaws at me because time and again we discover that the size of the grave was quite accurate. There was someone in the shadows, every day, pencil in hand, calculating the volume of the hole to dig. This person intrigues me.