Home / News & Publications / Michigan Catholic News / 2009 / Priest's work could raise Holocaust estimate
Priest's work could raise Holocaust estimate
by Robert Delaney of The Michigan Catholic
Published February 20, 2009
Detroit — The research work of Fr. Patrick Desbois into the early years of the Holocaust could result in a significant upward revision of the death count of Jews murdered by the Nazis, says a local authority.
Hear Fr. Desbois
What: "The Holocaust By Bullets" – A priest's journey to uncover the truth behind the murder of 1.5 million Jews
When: Tuesday, Feb. 24, 7:30 p.m.
Where: D. Dan & Betty Kahn Building, Jewish Community Campus, 6600 W. Maple Road, West Bloomfield Township
Tickets: $10 advance; $15 at door
Contact: (248) 432-5692 |
"He's estimated about a million-and-a-half to 2 million Jews were murdered in the western part of the Soviet Union," says Charles Silow, Ph.D., director of the Program for Holocaust Survivors and West Bloomfield-based Families for the Jewish Home and Aging Services.
Explaining that the often-cited figure of 6 million killed in the Holocaust is a rounding off of an actual estimate not quite that high, Silow predicts, "I think that figure of 6 million is going to be revised upward to 7 million or more when all is said and done."
Fr. Desbois, a French priest has been interviewing surviving eyewitnesses of Nazi atrocities in Ukraine, Belarus and Russia, and numerous unmarked graves have been found as a result of his investigations.
He will share his findings Tuesday in a talk co-sponsored by the Jewish Community Center and the Archdiocese of Detroit, among others.
Silow says the interviews Fr. Desbois has conducted show the Nazis routinely rounded up local Jews, shot them and dumped their bodies into unmarked mass graves as they invaded the western Soviet Union – now Ukraine, Belarus and Russia.
Then, later, finding this method "inefficient," they established the death camps where they shipped trainloads of Jews to be killed in gas chambers, Silow explains. In histories of the Holocaust, the earlier phase has previously received less attention, partly because it was not well-documented – until the work of Fr. Desbois.
Silow, a psychologist, not only works with Holocaust survivors and their families, but is a member of a survivor family himself. "My father was able to flee Poland for Soviet Russia, but my mother survived the Lodz ghetto, Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen," he says.
Silow praises Fr. Desbois for making it "his life's mission to be able to give honor and respect to the dead." Saying he believes Fr. Desbois "truly embodies what a man of God should be," he adds, "What he is doing we call a mitzvah, a tremendous good deed."
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