On a research trip to investigate the holocaust kill sites in Ukraine, I with an elderly couple in a village who lived there when their Jews were exterminated.
They were trembling so much that I thought they had Parkinson, but it was memory, not a disease, causing tremors.
The husband asked to cry and told me a story that had kept a secret for 80 years.
When he was a child, he was the best friend of a Jewish child, Izrik, who lived nearby. The Althehehany of the Jews from the village had already shot, Izrik and her mother, Hannah, had been allowed to stay because they work for a non -Jewish family.
One day, a People (Ethnic German) came home. In a sunny field, he shot Hannah in his head, then went down to Izrik while trying to run, still screaming for his mother.
The German stole his belongings and burned his bodies while my interlocutor watched from his hiding place in the middle of wild flowers.
He told me all this in the field where it happened.
I have heard the holocaust characterized as many things: tragedy, atrocity, catastrophe, genocide and shoah. However, lost in those great terms, it is the fact that the Holocaust was not just a crime against the written “great.
The impact of the Holocaust can feel collectively, but was personally experienced by each Jewish victim. Each Jewish was not killed by “the Nazis”, were killed by individual Nazis.
As we observed on Thursday Yom Hashoah, the day of the memory of the Holocaust for Israel and the Jews of the world, it is important to recognize that each murdered Jew was the victim of a crime.
Each author, victim and witness has a name, a face, a family and a story.
But as the number of survivors and living witnesses decreases, 70% of the survivors of the Jewish holocaust will do so in the next decade and 90% in 15 years, a study has just found, so does our ability to investigate those crimes.
Applying a forensic criminal lens to Nazi atrocities is difficult.
Archive investigation is an important first step, but it must be paired with visits to crime scenes. Only there we collect physical evidence and testimony of living witnesses of the Holocaust, many of whom spend their whole life in the same small village.
The Jews of Europe were not secretly killed. They were killed in broad daylight while their neighbors watched, either with joy or horror.
I have heard thousands of stories about cases such as Hannah and Izriks, a testimony that allows us to put names and faces to the dead, testimony that can only be gathered in person.
My organization, Yahad-In Unum, receives hundreds of applications every year of families trying to find out where and how their relatives were killed.
Because it is the truth, it gives a certain measure of catharsis, which allows the family to say Kaddish (the prayer of the Jewish commemorative prayer for the dead) in its last place of rest, even if it is a pitch of Mass.
The research process can also have a transformative effect in the researchers themselves.
A student of mine at the University of Georgetown arrived on a research trip to Poland, where we interviewed several witnesses and visited Auschwitz.
I was very motivated at the beginning of the trip, but I noticed his change when he found the legacy of the first -hand holocaust.
Shortly after our return, his family told me that he had asked to have a mitzvah bar, the Jewish ceremony of the age of majority that males generally suffer at age 13.
He had previously distanced himself from his Jewish identity, but when confronting genocidal anti -Semitism he changed his perspective as class lesson.
Unfortunately, we are running out of time to conduct thesis research. Every day, less survivors and witnesses remain, physical evidence is the descent, and these “cold cases” become more difficult to solve.
The testimony of the witnesses is unique. Once the witnesses die, their stories are lost forever.
Once I interviewed a man for three hours in a town near the sobibor extermination camp. The Nazis had forced him to transport sick Jews to the gas cameras in his car, something he had talked about since the war.
He died three weeks later.
The next few years are our last opportunity to gather as much evidence as we can.
And in the midst of high historical levels of anti -Semitism and denial of the Holocaust, which increased sharply after October 7, 2023, the largest massacre of Jews from the Holocaust, our mission has become more important than ever.
I can’t tell you how often I asked him: “Why did you tell someone what happened?” And he heard the most discouraging response: “No one asked, and who would care?”
This yom hashoah, I ask you to worry.
Yes, about “6 million” but also about the identities of each person in the 6 million, and of each of their murderers.
Without seeing victims as individuals and investigating their deaths, we cannot give them their families the dignity and justice they deserve.
Father Patrick Desbois is the founder and president of Yahad-in Unum and professor of the practice of the Forensic Study of the Holocaust at the University of Georgetown.