Base of a machine gun spare barrel case recovered postwar at a mass execution site

Father Patrick Desbois is the president of Yahad- In Unum (Together as One), an organization he co-founded in 2004 to develop and promote Christian-Jewish understanding. He is also a Roman Catholic priest and director of the Episcopal Committee for Relations with Judaism, which is connected with the French Conference of Bishops. Father Desbois was born in Chalon-sur-Saone, France, in 1955 and grew up on a farm in the Bresse region of eastern France. As a young man, he joined the French civil service and taught mathematics in West Africa. He went to Calcutta to work with Mother Teresa for three months. After this, he decided to join the priesthood, a decision that shocked his secular family. He became a parish priest and studied Judaism and learned Hebrew. He asked to do outreach work with groups such as Roma, ex-prisoners, and Jews, and was appointed a liaison with the Jewish community in France. His family had lived on the farm throughout the German occupation of France during World War II, 6/25/1940-8/25/1944. His paternal grandfather, as a soldier in the French Army, had been deported by the Germans following the occupation. He was sent to Rava-Ruska prison camp, then on the Ukrainian side of the Polish border, now in Ukraine. His grandfather never talked about his experiences, but he did once comment to his grandson that, as bad as it was for French prisoners-of-war, it was much worse for other types of inmates. A maternal cousin who had been a member of the resistance was deported and killed in a German concentration camp. As an adult, he learned from his mother that the family had often hidden members of the French Resistance on the farm. Desbois was haunted by his grandfather's silence. He made repeated trips to Rava-Ruska where his grandfather had been imprisoned. On one visit, the mayor took him to the edge of the forest where a group of elderly villagers were gathered to tell him what they had witnessed. Desbois finally learned what his grandfather would not say - that, unlike what Desbois had supposed, the killings were not done in secret. They were public spectacles, performed in broad daylight, and people wanted to be there and watch. Since 2001, Desbois has led research teams to discover the fate of Jewish victims of Nazi Germany, specifically of the Einsatzgruppen [killing squads] that operated in Eastern Europe during World War II. Based in Paris, Yahad-in Unum’s mission is to discover every mass grave and site where Jews were killed in the Ukraine. They research and compare documents from German and Soviet archives, searching for clues to locations where the killings occurred. They then travel to the villages to find witnesses who will tell them the location of the mass graves. Yahad has identified over 800 of an estimated 2000 sites. Father Desbois also seeks out and has recorded personal testimonies of hundreds of the remaining witnesses to the atrocities. As of 2015, they had recorded 4000 witness testimonies. “At first, sometimes, people don’t believe I’m a priest. I have to use simple words and listen to these horrors - without any judgment. I cannot react to the horrors that pour out. If I react, the stories will stop.”

Yahad–In Unum was created in 2004 to facilitate understanding and collaboration between Catholics and Jews. The name of the organization is based upon the Hebrew and Latin words for together. The central reseach mission is to document the mass executions of more than 2 million Jews and thousands of Roma people in Eastern Europe between 1941 and 1944 by Nazi Germany and those who collaborated with them. Through the investigation of this Holocaust by bullets, Yahad-In Unum has discovered hundreds of mass graves of murdered victims and recorded the testimony of more than 3000 witnesses. The organization works to collect the evidence, village by village, region by region, searching for the last witnesses to these crimes. Yahad-In Unum seeks to identify each grave site in order to refute those who deny the Holocaust and to allow for the respectful remembrance of the fallen.

The machine gun was donated to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in 2010 by Father Patrick Desbois on behalf of Yahad-in Unum.

United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Collection, Gift of Yahad-in Unum

Funding Note: The cataloging of this artifact has been supported by a grant from the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany.