ADL Honors Father Patrick Desbois for his Search for Truth Behind the Holocaust Posted: September 24, 2008

New York, NY, September 24, 2008 -- The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) honored Father Patrick Desbois, a Catholic priest whose heroic mission to investigate the murder of Ukrainian Jews by Nazi mobile killing units during World War II is chronicled in his newly published book, "The Holocaust By Bullets" (Palgrave Macmillan).

Father Desbois painstakingly documented and uncovered the history of the first mass victims of the Holocaust, the 1.5 million Jews murdered in Eastern Europe.

Calling the book "a moving personal memoir and a powerful monument to those who perished," Abraham H. Foxman, ADL National Director and a Holocaust survivor presented Father Desbois with a traditional Jewish papercut inscribed in six languages -- including Hebrew, English and French -- with a Biblical message of love and respect.

"Father Desbois has explored a painful chapter of the Holocaust. He has filled it with fact, nuance and detail," Mr. Foxman told a gathering of Holocaust survivors, religious leaders and dignitaries at ADL's national headquarters in New York City.  "He has searched for truth and granted the victims a measure of justice."

The grandson of a deportee to the Rawa Ruska camp near the Ukrainian border, Father Desbois set out to investigate the mass murder of Eastern European Jews by the Nazis and to honor the victims with proper burials and bring life to their stories.  Using forensic evidence, eyewitness accounts, and new archival material, Desbois created the first definitive account of one of history's forgotten chapters.

Mr. Foxman said Father Desbois had set a high moral example as a person of righteousness who, like those who hid saved lives during the Holocaust by protecting Jews from the gas chambers, shined lights on the darkness of the Nazi nightmare.

"Now, by Father Desbois' painstaking work, we know unequivocally that beyond the Nazi killing factories of Auschwitz and Treblinka were the killing fields of the Ukraine," said Mr. Foxman. "This happened in town squares and in forests and in large pits dug in sight of the local populace – by men for whom shooting bullets into scores of Jewish men, women and children was just another days work.

Father Desbois, of Paris, France, is secretary to the French Conference of Bishops for relations with Judaism, advisor to the Cardinal-Archbishop of Lyon and advisor to the Vatican on the Jewish religion.