Excerpt (without the footnotes) from: Father Patrick Desbois, The Holocaust by Bullets, pages 171 to 179
On the morning of April 16, 2006, I went to pray in the Latin Armenian church of Lviv. The crowd of believers was dense, even early in the morning. Svetlana always accompanied me to the church. She often placed a beeswax candle before an icon. Without these moments of recollection and celebration, we would not have been able to keep going. The sun was shining but the air was cool. It was Palm Sunday, in a week, it would be Easter.Back in Busk, many people were not able to enter the Greek Catholic church with their beautiful highly decorated palms. The latecomers were outside, listening in silence to the account of the passion of Christ. Children were wearing their smartest clothes. We were celebrating Jesus's entry into Jerusalem. The affable priest had asked us to be present at this mass, during which he was going to announce that we were trying to find out how the Jews were killed, here in Busk, 63 years ago. When we contacted him, he had replied: "It's only right that the Jews should have a tomb. Our bishop himself saved many Jews during the war. I will do everything I can to help you. Com to the Palm Sunday mass; a lot of people will be there. You will be able to meet those who saw the executions."
The children came out first, happily running and jumping about, a blessed palm in their hand. A large, austere wooden cross stood at the entrance of the church. It had been decorated for the holiday with a large crown of green boxwood. As soon as the mass was over, we were approached by a horde of elderly people, mainly women. Witnesses who saw the ghetto and the executions of the Jews streamed out of the mass one after the other. There were so many that we could not possibly interview them all. Svetlana took note of their names and addresses on the blank pages of a little diary.
How moving it was: All these Ukrainians who, alerted a few minutes earlier by the parish priest, cut short the Palm Sunday holiday so that the truth about the genocide of the Jews could be known and communicated.
One of these people, dressed all in black, a mantilla fixed to a little round black hat, was absolutely determined to speak. She continued to repeat: "I saw everything. I saw everything!" She finally made her way through the crowd and came up to us. Her name was Lydia.
Her family practiced the same profession as mine: butchering animals and selling them in a shop. As traders, they had numerous encounters with the owners of Jewish shops in the center of town. Every witness saw part of the genocide. None of them can recount the whole thing. That is the limit of visual memory. Lydia saw horse-drawn carts bearing the bodies of Jewish women killed in the ghetto. She believed that these women had been hiding or tried to escape. She remembered having run behind these carts full of bodies as a child, all the way to the door of the cemetery. She supposed that the Germans had killed a lot of people in the ghetto. She also saw trucks full of women and Jewish children, who were crying.
Lydia followed all our investigations in town. But it was only much later that she would finally say what she really saw, encouraged by he daughter who kept telling her: "Mama, you must tell the whole truth!" One day she arrived without warning in the Jewish cemetery, and showed us where all the communal graves were.
We also met a civil engineer, who had been given to the task, after the war, of recycling the houses of the Jews; she told us that she found bank notes and candlesticks. We also found people who came at night to give food to the Jews of the ghetto in exchange for clothes. Lydia told us how people could get into the ghetto without getting caught by the guards.
In addition to gathering testimonies on the ground, we continued with our research in the Soviet archives at the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington D.C. There, far from the geese and horses of Busk, we spent hours sitting in front of microfilm readers. We found several names of other Ukrainian witnesses from Busk who had given evidence in 1944 to the town district attorney. The Soviet archives are proportionate to the size of the country they come from: 16 million pages. In 1944, the district attorney of Busk had interrogated Ukrainian witnesses who lived in Chevtchenko Street, that long street that bordered the Jewish cemetery. Without realizing it, in 2006 we had knocked at the same doors as the district attorney did 62 years earlier.
The degree to which the testimonies dovetailed with each other was astounding, in terms of both form and content. The Jewish cemetery had had a caretaker, Yvan, before the war. His house next to the cemetery at 13 Chevtchenko Street no longer exists. When I read his testimony contained in the archives I discovered that he not only recounted the same facts as Anton but that the very tone of his narrative was similar: "The Ukrainian police and four to five Germans transported, for over a week, Jews in a truck to a pit that had already been dug. The naked Jews had to sit down in front of the pit, facing it, and they were killed with machine guns. They killed a lot of Jews; I don't know how many. All the Jews are buried in 10 or more pits next to the Jewish cemetery in Busk. I know all these pits."
We found the testimony of a cleaning lady who worked for the Germans. She heard them talking about the executions every evening. Her testimony is the most complete because she remembered all the executions, with their dates and circumstances. She recounted in particular that the Germans came back every evening, very proud of what they had done, boasting about it.
Her neighbor, Stanislav, lived at number 25 Chevtchenko Street. He was a desiatnik. Most of the witnesses had been requisitioned in Busk to assist the Germans in the execution of the Jews stated that it had been the desiatnik who had come to take them from their homes, under the orders of the mayor. In Busk, the assassins from the Reich used the Soviet structure for the requisitions. In his testimony, Stanislav clearly named Lehner, the head of the German gendarmerie, as the one who had taken charge of the executions. He said: "During the German occupation, I worked as a desiatnik in Busk, in Chevtchenko Street. In May 1943, I don't remember the exact date, German gendarmes came to my house on the orders of Lieutenant Ludwig Lehner who was head of the German gendarmerie, and also German commander of the town of Busk. These German gendarmes demanded, under threat of death, that I bring citizens to dig pits near the Jewish cemetery. Under that threat, I followed the orders, and when the pits were ready, a German gendarme by the name of Maier and other German gendarmes and Ukrainian police transported the Jews from the ghetto to the pits where they were forced to undress completely. They had to put their things in a pile and, in groups of 10 or more people, they had to kneel before the pits. Then they were killed with machine guns. The executions lasted more than a week. More than a thousand Jews were killed before the eyes of the citizens, but we couldn't approach the pits … In total, in the Jewish cemetery there are almost 10 pits where the bodies of the Jews were buried.
We could have ended things there. The simple comparison between the oral memory we had gathered in 2006, and the testimony recorded by the district attorney of Busk in 1944, was enough to confirm our certainty and out knowledge of the execution of the Jewish community of Busk. But an unexpected event turned around and enriched our investigations.
Jacques Fredj, the director of the Holocaust Memorial in Paris, had long expressed the desire for archaeological research to be carried out on an extermination site, so that no one could object that we didn't have material proof. I thought the idea a good one but difficult to implement. To my knowledge, no archaeological research on a mass grave had been carried out since 1990. I then decided, with my team, to organize an expert study in Busk. Why Busk? Because the inhabitants had told us that the graves had never been tampered with. They agreed that all the houses in the villages had a "view" of the graves, and so since the war no marauder had dared to open them in search of gold.
We decided we would insist in the presence of an orthodox rabbi so that the excavations would not contravene Jewish law. Meshi Zahav, the founder of Zaka, accepted to come from Jerusalem in person to oversee the work in its entirety. I called on the dean of the archaeology department in Lviv because I wanted the work to be carried out by an Ukrainian organization. The excavations were organized in August 2006 and were to last three weeks with the help of archaeologists.
The challenge was doubly complex. On the one hand we had to respect Jewish laws and on the other hand we wanted to obtain scientific results as precise as possible in terms of the identity of the victims, their number, and the cause of death. The Jewish law, the Halakha , specifies that bodies must not be moved under any circumstances, particularly the victims of the Holocaust. According to Orthodox Jewish tradition, these victims are resting in the fullness of God, and any movement of the bodies would disturb that peace. Hence the archaeologist could only uncover the first layer of bodies, taking care not to move any bones. In addition, the bodies had to be covered up again as soon as the archaeologist finished working. Svetlana therefore spent the month of August not interpreting but looking in all the textile shops in the area for white sheets that she bought every day by the dozen, so as to be able to respect that tradition.
We thought that in Busk there were at most seven communal graves. When the archaeologist began inspecting the relief of the terrain, he estimated the number of communal graves at 17. This was not even the site of the execution of all the Jews of Busk who were assassinated by the Reich. Busk is situated not far from Poland and the ghetto was the target of various German Aktions. A large part of the Jewish community was taken by train to the extermination camp at Belzec, in present-day Poland. The graves therefore contained only the last Jews of Busk, around 1,750 people. Most of them were women and children who had hidden after the German attacks in the ghetto. They were found in cellars, imprisoned in the gendarmerie, and shot.
The bodies appeared one after the other. We were able to establish whether it was a man, a woman or a child and above all the cause of death. The impact of the bullets and the position of the bodies showed that they had all been shot and buried alive. Many of the women's bodies were found holding a baby, to protect it from the flow of sand. It was three weeks of macabre discoveries.
Before we arrived, the villagers had used the green, flowered fields over the pits for their geese and horses to graze in peace. Our undertaking involved numerous negotiations. A couple of farmers were in the habit of crossing the village with their cows, passing through the Jewish cemetery and the site of the communal graves. They came one evening to ask us politely if they could continue to pass through there, otherwise they would have to take a long detour. I devised a pathway through the communal graves so that every morning and evening, at milking time, men and animals could pass.
Of course the site also had to be guarded at night because many of the dead still had gold teeth and all too often the inhabitants of the village would come to ask us the same question: "Have you found gold?"
After three weeks, all the graves had been opened. It was impossible to carry out a typical scientific study because we had to respect Jewish law and could not move any of the bones. We could therefore only observe what appeared on the surface. The missing information, though, appears in the German and Soviet archives of 1944, which explicitly mention the execution of the Jews in the cemetery. These were also confirmed for us by our 10 witnesses, who identified the grave sites with precision.
The research was very difficult to undertake, particularly because of the indifference of the village people. A single villager came, dressed in black, with a little bunch of red and yellow flowers from her garden. She placed it in front of the mass grave and then withdrew a little and stood in silence for a while. She left without saying anything.
Before closing the graves again, I hired a helicopter (the one that monitored the oil pipelines crossing the region) to take aerial shots of the ensemble of graves. When I saw the helicopter land, I thought that only its paintwork looked recent. There were no seatbelts. Undeterred, Guillaume climbed into the helicopter without hesitation. Thanks to this means of transport, we were able to measure the extent of the massacre: 17 graves next to the Jewish cemetery, which seemed very small in comparison to them. I imagine that if we could open all the mass graves we would have to take aerial photos of the whole of Ukraine. A mass cemetery of anonymous pits into which men, women and children were thrown. Not a camp but a country of graves.
Once the archaeological study was finished, we had to cover these graves with a particular kind of tar used for airport runways so that the dead would not be disturbed in their rest by people looking for dental gold. The assistant mayor of Rawa-Ruska, Yaroslav, came to our aid by coordinating the work.
On September 1, 2006, after the graves were finally covered, the great rabbi of the yeshiva of Belz, Rabbi Bohl, arrived from Lviv in a grey car, accompanied by 10 young members of his religious community, to recite the kaddish .
Yitgadal veyitkadach chemé raba
Bealma di vera khiroute.
The unchanging words seemed to resonate and take us back to a time when, long ago, the kaddish must have been recited often. Despite the constant difficulties, I had astonishingly felt nothing during the whole excavation. But when the kaddish resounded through the Jewish cemetery, before the communal graves that had been forgotten and denied since 1943, my emotions spilled over. For the first time in a very long time, I had the feeling that the boat was coming into harbor. Finally, a Jewish prayer was being pronounced for these young mothers and these little Jewish children who had been killed and buried like animals beside the river.
On the morning of September 2, 2006, we left Busk, moved and tired. For three weeks we had been shuttling every day between the hotel and the graves. Early in the morning - the landscape was already filled with fog although August was just over - we went back and, for the last time, looked at the 17 grave sites. We were surprised to see several locals, whom we had barely seen before then, moving up the slope with wheelbarrows, on their way to collect the leftover bags of cement.
