Horrors of Holocaust in Ukraine uncovered

Aged men and women in Ukraine are unburdening themselves of wartime memories, many for the first time, in testimonies to a French priest. Their words may change history, as they shed light on this poorly known chapter of the Holocaust.

Father Patrick Desbois and his mixed-faith team have been crisscrossing Ukraine for six years and have located more than 500 mass graves, many never before recorded. The project is central to a broader reassessment of the Nazi horrors in Ukraine that followed the June 1941 invasion of the Soviet Union. Last month, a team of rabbis visited a newly found grave site in the Ukrainian village of Gvozdavka-1 where thousands of Jews were killed during the Nazi occupation.

At least 1.5 million Jews were killed on hills and in ravines across Nazi-occupied Ukraine, most slaughtered by submachine guns before the gas chambers became machines of mass death. Researchers are only now peeling back layers of Soviet-era silence about what they call the "Holocaust by bullets."

Part of Desbois' work so far - video interviews with Ukrainian villagers, photos of newly discovered mass graves, archival documents, and shell casings - is on public display for the first time in a haunting exhibit at Paris' Holocaust Memorial through Nov. 30.

"I'm not here to judge," Desbois, whose Catholic grandfather survived a Nazi camp, said in an interview with The Associated Press. The people whose stories Desbois records, he stresses, were "children, adolescents. They were poor. They were afraid."