At the head of the association Yahad - In Unum, the French priest Patrick Desbois has been documenting for nearly twenty years the crimes committed by the Nazis against the Jews in Eastern Europe during the Second World War.
With his teams, this grandson of a deportee investigates mass executions.
He has also accompanied Yazidis victims of abuses by the Islamic State group in Iraq and Syria.
From the beginning of the Russian invasion in Ukraine, Father Desbois decided to launch a collection of testimonies on this conflict.
Director of the academic council of the Babi Yar memorial in kyiv – a site which contains the remains of nearly 34,000 Jews massacred in 1941 while the city was under Nazi occupation – he began to interview victims of the war in Ukraine.
With the help of mediators in the field, he was able to record these interviews using a video conferencing application.
France 24: Why did you decide to launch this collection of testimonies on the current war in Ukraine
?
Patrick Desbois
:
When the war in Ukraine broke out, one of my best friends, Ruslan Kavatsiuk, the deputy director of the Babi Yar memorial, said this terrible sentence to me: "Patrick, you will come back for our mass graves ."
I really didn't think there would be.
But when we started to see the massacres of civilians without any military motivation, it seemed obvious to me to do this collection work.
If I don't, who will?
We have been working in Ukraine for twenty years.
In all, 8,000 people from the former Soviet Union who witnessed the Holocaust were interviewed.
We know a lot of people, the villages, the topography.
Father Patrick Desbois starts investigation of crimes committed by the Russian Federation in #Ukraine.
The goal of the project: Discovering the horrors of the crimes committed on a massive scale against the Ukrainian civilian population.
@desbois_patrick pic.twitter.com/x3MZQbyb24
— Babyn Yar Holocaust Memorial Center (@babynyarhmc) March 25, 2022
How do you collect these testimonials
?
We are a team of four people here in Western Europe and we have a team of a dozen mediators on site.
One of them is in Irpin and he is looking for witnesses.
He knows a lot of people and introduces us.
We also feel the urgency to do so.
Witnesses can quickly disperse.
People agree to speak openly, in zoom and giving their true identity.
It surprised me.
Whatever damage they have suffered, they want to stay in their country and defend it.
In all the surveys I have done, I have never seen this.
I have in mind the testimony of an injured woman who was in the hospital.
She had lost part of her family while they were driving.
She almost cried during the interview, but when she finished, she said, "As soon as I get better, I'm going to get my life back and I'm going to help people."
I couldn't believe it.
There really is a spirit of resistance.
How has the work you've already done on mass crimes helped you
?
In Iraq, we filmed 450 Yazidis who had just left Daesh and who were trying to identify their rapists or their murderers.
Without these previous surveys, we could not do this work today.
We know how to handle these kinds of interviews.
I think of a woman who was driving with her three-year-old son on her lap.
She told us that she immediately understood that a bullet had passed through her child's body.
He was asked a lot of details about the color of the car, whether it could have been mistaken for a military vehicle or even the exact location of the attack.
We had to be able to locate it on an interactive map and see if there were any military objectives in this area because it is clear that the Russians are going to say that there is
This recurrent denial of the Russians strikes me particularly.
When they bomb a maternity hospital, like in Mariupol, they say it was no longer a maternity hospital and there were no pregnant women.
They deny the crime as soon as it is exposed.
For the bodies found in the town of Boutcha, they say that they were placed there, that they are not dead and that the corpses are moving.
Historically, I had never seen this.
Whenever a crime is discovered, they deny it the same day in detail.
It's as if in Oradour-sur-Glane, the same day, the Germans had said: "No, it was the resistance fighters who fired on the inhabitants. We didn't kill anyone."
These rapid denials are explained by the acceleration due to social media and the fact that the war led by Putin is supported by unimaginable propaganda.
Any loopholes in the propaganda must be filled immediately.
I also think that after the announcements of the opening of an investigation by the International Criminal Court or of a judgment in France or Germany, the Russians know that legal action will be taken.
They seek immediate protection.
The testimonies we collect will be evidence for these investigations.
I remember Kherson, its rabbi, its synagogue and its help to the poorest.
I remember the mass graves of the Jews shot.
And my heart is with you.
Kherson is announced to have fallen.
Putin did not liberate Kherson, he annihilated her.
pic.twitter.com/oGdmjjMtWY
— Patrick Desbois (@desbois_patrick) March 3, 2022
How did you feel when you discovered the images of the abuses committed in the town of Boutcha
?
It made me think of the streets of Kigali.
We knew that crimes had been committed in Ukraine, but until then we did not know that the Russians had shot people en masse and that they had used the method of mass graves.
By broadcasting these images, we show the Russian authorities that they are under our gaze.
We tell them: "We know that you kill civilians, we know that you rape women, we know that you loot apartments. The whole planet is watching you and you will be judged. Your denials will not hold."
Despite everything, I fear that the Russians will think that they made a mistake in Boutcha and that they now decide to make the evidence disappear, as was done a lot during the Second World War.
Are there also similarities with the testimonies that you collected on the Second World War
?
People whose heads have been washed by propaganda are transformed into criminals, with rapes, robberies and murders.
I have seen this several times in villages hit by the Germans.
They supposedly came "with the purity of the race" and said that they were only eliminating a "sub-race".
But when we saw them on the ground, they raped women, they massacred families and they looted apartments.
There is no pure crime, it does not exist.
And to see that today, someone has been able to launch an ideology which thus mobilizes a population and an army and that this propaganda continues to work, it is almost unreal.
People think that humanity has advanced on these questions, but apparently the degree of freedom of conscience is very fragile.
It is almost unbelievable that these crimes committed almost in public arrive at the borders of Europe, two and a half hours by plane from Paris.
Everyone is revolted seeing Boutcha, but I wonder what it will be like when Mariupol is liberated?
Much larger scenes of massacres are to be expected.
There will be Boutcha everywhere.
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