On 60 Minutes, TV journalist Lara Logan interviews a French Catholic priest who is determined to find the unknown victims of the Holocaust in the former USSR. Father Patrick Desbois searches the unmarked mass graves “for history and for humanity.” Desbois reports that the victims are mostly Jews who were living in Eastern Europe when the Nazis invaded the USSR during WWII. Unlike the victims at concentration camps whose names were documented, the names of these victims of mass killings were not. “Totally invisible,” Desbois tells Logan. “Under a corn field, under house, under a tomato field. And never be recorded and still buried like animals.”
[Ted Kennedy’s Son Patrick Breaks Kennedy Code of Silence]
Desbois runs the organization Yahad—In Unum (translated “together as one”). With the help of elderly residents who were children during WWII, Desbois and Yahad have investigated more than 1700 execution sites in the former Soviet Union over the past 10 years. Desbois himself is the grandson of a WWII French prisoner held in the Rawa Ruska camp on the Poland-Ukraine border. He has also written the book, The Holocaust by Bullets: A Priest’s Journey to Uncover the Truth Behind the Murder of 1.5 Million Jews
