A Christian Science Monitor story on a priest who has taken on a unique task:

The confessions that Father Patrick Desbois receives don’t come from his parishioners. They are not made behind closed doors. They don’t even come from his countrymen. The words the French priest hears are the unburdening of villagers from Ukraine – the last witnesses to the mass killing of Jews in a little-known part of the Holocaust more than 60 years ago.

He recounts one story – just one of a thousand he’s heard – of a Ukrainian woman who was ordered by Nazi soldiers to cook them dinner. As they ate, the 25 Germans went out in pairs to kill Jews. By the time the meal was over, they had shot 1,200. It was the first time the woman had ever told the story. "These people want absolutely to speak before they die," says Father Desbois of the bystanders. "They want to say the truth."

Father Patrick Desbois has become one of the world’s foremost chroniclers of what the French call the Shoah par Balles – the Holocaust of bullets. Though neither Jewish nor Ukrainian, he spends half his year combing the poverty-stricken landscape of Ukraine to document the annihilation of tens of thousands of Jews at the hands of traveling bands of Nazis called the Einsatzgruppen.

It is a self-appointed task that led the Israeli newspaper Haaretz to decree him "Patrick the Saint." Embarrassed, Desbois calls the characterization a midrash – Hebrew for exaggeration.

The priest, who has devoted his clerical life to fighting anti-Semitism, is uncovering, village by village, unmarked mass graves from the Holocaust era. Here the Jews were shot, one by one, mother in front of child, child in front of father.

The "Holocaust of bullets" was every bit as brutal as the extermination of Jews by gas chamber, starvation, and other means at Auschwitz and elsewhere in Europe. Yet the depth and details of the tragedy in Ukraine have only recently surfaced.

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Desbois runs a lean team. A student in Germany combs police archives, which are cross-referenced against Soviet archives in Washington D.C., for period recollections. Then Desbois searches for three, unconnected eyewitnesses. He approaches them as a priest, in his collar, in his gentle manner. He reconstructs the massacres through their accounts – where the Jews walked, where the killers stood. Ballistic experts analyze shell casings found on the graves. Each witness is interviewed, photographed, and filmed.

"He never made anyone feel guilty," says Anne-Marie Revcolevschi, director of the French Shoah foundation, who has traveled with Desbois. "He is just trying to understand what happened."

Desbois takes out a series of black albums filled with photographs that could pass for 19th-century images. In rural Ukraine, the roads are unpaved, the faces of the people deeply lined. When Desbois’s team arrives in the most remote areas, blocked by rutted roads, the people tell him: the Nazis made the same journey, simply to kill. He shows one photo of an elderly man weeping. Like other witnesses to the massacres, this man saw the grave "still moving" after three days: In every village, many were buried alive.

"It is not always easy," says Desbois of his work. "And when it is much too difficult, I always think [of] my grandfather [who] was here three years in a camp and saw everything. Me, I am free." He sighs. "What I want is for the place to be respected as human places," he says. "I want to recover the memory because nobody was witness [to this] except those people I find. And they are very old. So we have to run to save the memory."