Saturday, October 6, 2007
Uncovering the Holocaust in the Ukraine
Father Patrick Desbois spends his time wandering the Ukrainian countryside talking to old peasants about how their Jewish neighbors were murdered, and where they were buried. His story has now reached the New York Times, where it will get the publicity he so richly deserves.
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I'm aware of many Jews who were persecuted in Ukraine in the first half of the last century. My parents were Ukrainians, pushed off to the slave labor camps in Germany during the second World War.
My parents often spoke of their parents hiding local Jews in their attics when occupying Nazis were searching for them in the 1940s.
It was a sad time for all people.
On Little Green Footballs, they had a post last year or whenever it was about the Holocaust denial "conference."
One of the commentators told the following story: He said that a friend of his family when he was a kid was a Ukrainian woman. She was in a city there when the Ukrainian Holocaust was going on. (I'm abysmally ignorant on the Ukrainian Holocaust and can't remember the name of the city, either.) She was walking through the town square to shop fairly early one morning when a soldier came through with a bunch of little kids. He saw the women going to shop and said, "Some of you women. Take these children. I'm supposed to take them away and they are going to die." (Words to that effect.) The other women turned away, but one little boy ran a few steps up to this woman. He said, "Auntie, won't you take me? I won't eat much." She looked down at him for a moment, then shook her head and rushed on her way, not wanting to get involved. A while later--I don't know how long--it hit her what she had done. She ran back to the square, but of course the soldier and the children were gone, and of course she couldn't find them.
So later in her life she told this story to her friends. A kind of penance, I suppose.
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