cns: French priest seeks out last witnesses to killing of Ukrainian Jews
By Judith Sudilovsky
Catholic News Service
JERUSALEM (CNS) — Perhaps in retrospect it was inevitable that Father Patrick Desbois dedicate a part of his life to seeking out the last witnesses to the Nazis’ mass executions of Jews in remote Ukrainian villages.
As a young child he alone among all his family was privy to his paternal grandfather’s stories about his imprisonment as a French soldier in Ukraine’s Rava-Ruska Nazi prison camp.
It was bad for the soldiers, his grandfather said, but it was worse for “the others on the outside.”
“Since I was a child I wanted to know who those ‘others’ were,” said Father Desbois, 52, a member of the French Prado Fathers who was in Israel in mid-October leading a French pilgrimage group.
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