Ukraine divulging its Holocaust horrors

PARIS — Children, stomachs empty and knees quivering, saw and heard Jews massacred by the Nazis all across the killing fields of Ukraine. Teenagers were forced to bury the victims, shoveling dirt over neighbors and playmates.

Today, these now aged men and women are unburdening themselves of wartime memories, many for the first time, in testimonies to a French priest. Their words may change history as they shed light on this poorly known chapter of the Holocaust.

The project is central to a broader reassessment of the Nazi horrors in Ukraine. Last month, a team of rabbis in another project visited a newly found grave site in the Ukrainian village of Gvozdavka-1 where thousands of Jews were killed during the occupation by Adolf Hitler's army.

That was just one site among many: Father Patrick Desbois and his mixed-faith team have been crisscrossing Ukraine for six years and have located more than 500 mass graves so far, many never before recorded.

At least 1.5 million Jews were killed on hills and in ravines across Nazi-occupied Ukraine, most slaughtered by submachine guns before gas chambers industrialized mass death. Researchers are only now peeling back layers of Soviet-era silence about what they call the "Holocaust by bullets."

Part of Desbois' work — video interviews with Ukrainian villagers, photographs of newly discovered mass graves, archival documents, bullets and shell casings — is on display for the first time in a haunting exhibit at Paris' Holocaust Memorial through Nov. 30.

"I'm not here to judge," Desbois, whose Roman Catholic grandfather survived a Nazi camp, said in an interview with The Associated Press.

He stresses that most of the people whose stories he records were children during the bloodletting. "They were poor. They were afraid."

And they stayed afraid for decades after World War II.

Soviet leaders gloried in victory over Hitler but focused on their nation's overall war losses, numbering as many as 27 million — barely mentioning the systematic slaughter of Jews.

Witnesses to the Holocaust and even survivors were considered suspect, with many accused of collaboration with the Nazis and sent to Soviet labor camps. Fear of speaking out about the Nazi occupation lingered even after the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991.

The destruction of Ukrainian Jewry is symbolized by Babi Yar, a ravine outside the capital, Kiev, where the Nazis killed about 34,000 Jews during just two days in September 1941. But there were many other killing fields.