Many of you know the great honor I have in paying tribute -- too often posthumously – to the courage of those who rescued Jews during the Holocaust.  I do this as a humble act of witness to the bravery of my Catholic nanny who hid me for more than four years and saved my life and surely that of my parents when so many of my other family perished. 

Men and women who set such high moral examples are to us persons of deep righteousness who make it possible for the world to endure.  By their active and unwavering humanity, these rescuers were shining lights in the darkness of the Nazi nightmare.  This evening I have another but different honor, no less great, in acknowledging the work of a man of the post-Shoah generation.

Father Patrick Desbois, who had he been alive might well have saved Jewish lives, has more than a half century later saved something as important – he has rescued the memory of countless murdered Jews by locating, confirming, and granting dignity to their once anonymous mass gravesites.  In doing so, he has performed the highest act of gemilut hesed -- deeds of loving kindness done for the dead, for there can never be any thought of repayment.

Father Desbois has explored a painful chapter of the Holocaust.  He has filled it with fact, nuance, and detail.  He has searched for truth and granted the victims a measure of justice. 

For 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 where 1.5 million Jews were slaughtered at close range – 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 day's work.

The product of difficult but committed research – interviewing aging eyewitnesses, locating and examining remains and studying shell casings, hunting down documents in Soviet archives -- the book Father Desbois has brought to the world, The Holocaust By Bullets, is a moving personal memoir and a powerful monument to those who perished.

Father Desbois might have followed a quite different path in life. Indeed, he was studying mathematics at university.  He came to his particular quest in part by remembering what was left unsaid about the past within his own Catholic family in provincial France.  His grandfather Claudius had been interned in the Rawa-Ruska camp, but young Patrick's attempts to learn what this meant were met with silence.  At Sunday lunches, the boy tried to ask questions when his grandfather was absent, but no sooner would the name "Rawa-Ruska" leave his lips, then "everybody started crying."  Only once did his grandfather admit to how difficult it had been to survive.  "But it was worse for the others!" he added.

It was later that Patrick Desbois understood that the "others" of whom Grandpa Claudius spoke were Jews.  After entering the religious life, after serving the poor and the ill in India and Africa, Father Desbois found himself in Poland and experienced a kind of epiphany.   

Finding himself near the Ukrainian border, near where Rawa-Ruska had been located, he writes, "I was suddenly brutally conscious of the unfathomable nature of what it was my grandfather had tried to make me grasp:  his deportation, and the Holocaust."

Thus, over time, Father Desbois' new education began – learning Hebrew at the University of Jerusalem and Jewish history, customs, and culture, including contact with living Judaism by way of a family of French Sephardic Jews originally from Algiers.  Father Desbois attended seminars at Yad Vashem and eventually organized a travel group to visit the actual sites of the Shoah.

With a group of survivors of Rawa-Ruska, he helped launch a drive to erect a proper memorial there.  And through his insatiable curiosity to understand and to see where one tragedy after another was enacted throughout the Ukraine, he came by degrees to chronicle the mass murder of Eastern European Jews by the Nazis.  This is the subject  of his extraordinary book which I recommend you read. 

Father Desbois' deep connection to the Jewish community encompasses modern, living Jewry as well.  He is secretary to the French Conference for Bishops for relations with Judaism, advisor to the Cardinal-Archbishop of Lyon, and advisor to the Vatican on the Jewish religion.

On the occasion of his book's publication, the Anti-Defamation League is enormously pleased to recognize Father Desbois and his moving personal account of how he came to his singular work of remembrance and memorialization. 

In tribute to his many years of dedication to this project, and to his work of increasing understanding about the Jewish people for the Holy See, on behalf of ADL I present to Father Patrick Desbois a work of traditional Jewish paper cut art which is inscribed in six languages, including Hebrew, English, and French: "Thus said the Lord, Blessed be He, to Israel:  My beloved children, what do I ask of you?  Only that you love and respect one another."

We give this to Father Desbois who -- in our own time when there are those who deny the Holocaust -- is a true shining light to the Jewish community and to the world, and we offer this with our heartfelt thanks.