We all have experienced rejection, - through betrayal by loved ones, being bullied by our peer group, being mocked for being "different." Our faith tells us that no matter how much or how often we are rejected, God will never reject us. God made us both who we are and how we are, and wants us to accept ourselves, love ourselves, as God loves us. The world may reject us. God never will. We are all made in the Image and Likeness of God; we are all brothers and sisters with the same Parent. God lives within every human soul.
Yet after learning to love ourselves after being rejected, our next test of our faith and our capacity to love is to choose to love others we know who are being rejected, who are outcasts. We ourselves know the pain, know what being shunned feels like. Our empathetic understanding can help heal others. One person who actively reaches out to the rejected is Fr. Patrick Desbois, a French Catholic priest. And the rejected ones whom he loves and looks after have been dead since the days of World War II: the millions of Jews in the villages of Eastern Europe who faced the ultimate rejection: murder. Attempted genocide to wipe out all whom the Nazis perceived as being "different."
Fr. Desbois is not a Jew, not a historian, not a detective. His goal is simply this: to help repair the world. As a young man, he studied Mathematics, and was a Math teacher for the French Government in Africa. Later he worked for Mother Teresa in Calcutta, where he helped set up homes for the dying. When he was finally ordained a priest, however, he discovered a new ministry, one his childhood had prepared him to embrace. His grandfather had been a French soldier captured by the Nazis and sent to a prison camp in Rawa-Ruska in the Ukraine. Young Patrick often questioned his grandfather about life in a concentration camp, but he remained silent except to say that he had it bad but the "others" had it worse. Who, the boy asked himself, were the "others"? Finally he learned the truth: the "others" were the Jews and Gypsies killed by the Nazis.
Surely it did not escape the notice of the young Desbois that the people who were doing the exterminating were called "Christians." Surely it must have bewildered and angered him that the Christian followers of Jesus, a Jew, would conspire to kill Jesus' own people, who had given the world the knowledge of God, the riches of the Torah.
While he was studying for ordination, Desbois studied the Jewish faith and learned about the Shoah ( the Holocaust) from French Jews. Finally, he traveled to the Ukraine to see Rawa-Ruska, to experience for himself what his grandfather had experienced in a landscape little changed since World War II. He was shocked while there to discover that there were no markings, no commemorations to the 1.25 million victims in Ukraine and Belarus.
Fifteen thousand Jews lived in the town of Rawa-Ruska before World War II. Desbois asked to see where they were murdered. The Mayor brushed him off. No one, the young priest was informed, knows anything about it. Again and again, Desbois visited the town, to be met by the same conspiracy of silence.
Finally a new Mayor was elected. When asked about the murders of the town's Jews, he led Desbois to a forest clearing where approximately fifty elderly men and women stood in a circle. They told him that he was standing on the graves of the last fifteen hundred Jewish men, women, and children of Rawa-Ruska, slaughtered while the townspeople watched. These elders had been children and teens when it happened; they had seen the Jews forced to stand before deep trenches, then shot in the back of the head so they would fall into the mass graves.
One by one the men and women told him individual stories. The Germans had forced them, children and teens, to guard the Jews to prevent them from escaping, to cover the corpse-filled pits, to serve soldiers food, to bring a gramophone so they could listen to music. Fr. Desbois was the first person to whom they had told their stories in all these years. One person said to him, "Why are you coming so late? We have been waiting for you." Waiting to tell their stories to someone listening with the quiet face, eyes, and voice of the compassionate God whom the priest represents.
Today, Fr. Desbois is the Head of the Commission for Relations with Judaism of the French Bishops' Conference, and Consultant to the Vatican. He has also worked with Catholic and Jewish leaders of the French community to found "Yahad-In-Unam," Hebrew and Latin for "Together." He is currently President of this organization whose primary, most ambitious initiative is to locate the sites of mass graves of one million Jewish victims of the Nazi Mobile Killing Units in the Ukraine. Today his team examines old German documents and travels from village to village, using metal detectors to look for German bullets, belt buckles, jewelry, to discover hidden graves. Fr. Desbois speaks with village elders and their testimony is recorded.
Recently "Sixty Minutes" did a feature story on Father Desbois. Alan B. Goldberg, the Producer, traveled with Fr. Desbois and discovered he was the first Jew in seventy years to return to the sites. He said Prayers for the Dead at each site, to let them know, he says, that someone came back to honor them.
Fr. Desbois will tell you that these murders were not secret in the villages, like the concentration camps kept their heinous starvings and executions secret. The murders were incredibly public. The people in small village after small village gathered and watched. These rejected dead have been lost souls, forgotten by history, slain like animals. "We are here," he says, "because it's not finished. Genocide is a disease that sleeps and awakens from one generation to the next. The Germans recorded their mass executions. So does Isis. And today we are the neighbors who can find their beheadings on the Internet with one click. We have to watch," he says. "We have to fight. We have to fight those who want to eliminate others because they are different."
We don't want to watch. We want to forget. Or, jaded and numbed by the disease of violence happening over and over again, perpetrated by Isis against both Muslims and Christians, by the vicious, the malevolent, or the mentally unstable in schools, shopping malls, and theaters, we watch paralyzed, unable to conceive of any way to halt what we see. Our own media bring us closer to our world yet isolate us by seducing us to live our lives on the Internet instead of in personal encounters. Watching shootings and beheadings becomes a spectator sport instead of a tearful encounter with real, suffering human beings.
Will we be like those villagers who watched their neighbors be slaughtered? For we are brothers and sisters to all in a global village. Or will we, as nations, and as U.S. citizens, find a way to cooperate with each other, dialogue with each other, overcome our differences that have solidified into warring ideologies? Can we take heart, be courageous, to fight the disease of radical rejection in the ways open to us? God can only overcome rejection through us. Through us God can say "I will never forget you; I have carved you on the palms of my hands."