Sheska Ploskowitz Is A Witness

A Holocaust witness talks to the Rev. Patrick Desbois in the Ukraine. She was just a teenager, and Nazis forced her to bury her schoolmates.

 

1,500,000 Murdered By A 'Holocaust Of Bullets'

At least 1.5 million Jews were killed across Nazi-occupied Ukraine, mostly slaughtered with submachine guns. Researchers are only now peeling back layers of Soviet-era silence about what they call the "Holocaust by Bullets."
 

Rachel Never Talked Before

Today, these now aged men and women are pouring their souls to Father DesBois, unleashing suppressed memories. Their words may change history as they shed light on this poorly-known chapter of the Holocaust.
 

Father Desbois Finds Witnesses And  Artifacts

He took photographs of newly discovered mass graves, archival documents, bullets and shell casings, putting the on display at Paris' Holocaust Memorial through Nov. 30.

 

The Good Father's Grand Poppa Was Jewish

"I'm not here to judge," said Desbois, whose grandfather survived a Nazi camp. For years he cried with his grandfather over the brutality he suffered at Rava Ruska camp in western Ukraine.

Desbois visited in the 1990s and asked the mayor where the Jews were buried. The mayor said he didn't know.

The Witnesses Were Children

He stresses that most of the people whose stories he records were children during the bloodletting. "They were poor. They were afraid." And they stayed afraid for decades.

Soviet leaders barely mentioned the slaughter of Jews.
 

Witnesses Never Talked

Witnesses to the Holocaust, and even survivors, were considered suspect, with many Jews accused of collaboration with the Nazis. Fear of speaking out lingered even after the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991.
 

Jewish Priest Says The Ukraine Is A Giant Graveyard

Desbois says his group has surveyed about a third of Ukraine, and found 726 mass graves. .

 

Sarah Novabski Beat Dying Jews With A Shovel!!

Sarah was at the Zhytomyr village massacre. She testified that Nazis murdered all the village Jews, and that she was given a shovel to bury them, but they were still moving. Sarah had to beat them to death with the shovel.
 

Then my mother came, and asked me questions I wasn't able to answer."