Chronicling the Holocaust's eastern front

The Rev. Patrick Desbois is a Paris-based investigator who has spent the last decade delving into a crime of staggering proportions: the killing of as many as two million Jews in the former Soviet Union.

For a decade, Desbois has traveled into remote corners of Ukraine and Belarus, as well as Russia and Moldova.

He knocks on doors and asks villagers three questions: Were you here during World War II? Were you present during the killing of Jews?

And, finally, will you tell me your story?

Desbois and his associates have recorded more than 3,200 interviews with witnesses to genocide. In the process, they have documented a lesser-known chapter of the Holocaust that played out in the former Soviet Union.

He does it, he said, "for the memory of the world."

Desbois explained his work with the Christian-Jewish organization he founded, Yahad-In Unum ("together" in Hebrew and Latin), at a fund-raiser Thursday at the Union League for the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

Also at the event was Police Commissioner Charles H. Ramsey, who, while Washington police chief, helped launch a leadership-training program at the museum for police cadets.

Desbois' nonprofit, which has 20 full-time investigators, works with the museum's Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies to identify villages to investigate. They pore through Soviet records from the 1940s that detail mass killings and were released only after the fall of the communist regime in 1991.

"We are learning history in detail that we didn't know before," said Paul Shapiro, director of the center, in an interview before the dinner.

Shapiro said most people equate the Holocaust with concentration camps and are less familiar with the fact that mobile Nazi killing units invaded the Soviet Union in 1941 with orders to kill Jews.

Desbois began seeking eyewitness accounts in 2002. His interest in the Holocaust stemmed from his grandfather's experience during World War II as a French soldier. He had been deported to a Nazi prison camp in Rawa-Ruska in Ukraine, where thousands of Jews had been murdered.

Every year, Desbois makes five trips to the ex-Soviet Union, as well as Poland and Romania. He said he had interviewed more than 1,800 people who witnessed mass killings.

One woman told him about going to the market with her mother "to see the shooting of Jews." Many witnesses confided that they helped dig graves or retrieve shoes from corpses.

In August, Desbois spent 17 days in the Russian town of Kranosdar. His team interviewed 60 people, including a woman in her 80s named Olga.

She was working in the fields with her mother when they heard a ruckus by the river. German troops had rounded up 3,000 Jewish refugees by the water's edge. Then, they marched them into the deep water, where they drowned. She said the victims' bodies bobbed in the river like a fish kill.

Olga remembered seeing three girls try to run before being shot by German soldiers.

Like many eyewitnesses, Olga said she had not spoken of the incident since the war.

Many "want to speak about it before they die," he said.