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The executions mainly took place on the outskirts of the towns and villages, in front of non-Jewish local inhabitants. Some of the witnesses are still alive and they have agreed to give their testimony. Those interviewed by YIU in Eastern Europe were, at the time, curious teenagers, neighbors, forced spectators, or requisitioned by Germans and local authorities to perform various tasks in the shooting process (digging the graves, burying the corpses, collecting the clothes of the victims etc.). YIU team members interview as many witnesses as they can in the framework of a police investigation, and reconstruct the different steps of the killing and the crime scene.
The methodology of YIU depends on cross-referencing between archives and testimonies, and between the testimonies themselves.
The majority of mass graves located by the organization
communities in these areas. Memory also survived among the local people who live there - Ukrainians, Belarusians and Poles. Using this local memory for historical research has been a great undertaking of the team led by Father Patrick Desbois for many years,” explains Piotr Cywinski, the Director of Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum.
A methodology of investigation
The field trips led by Yahad - In Unum require a significant amount of research within the German and the Soviet archives beforehand. The archives yield a wealth of information on the mass shootings perpetrated against Jews and on the location of the killing sites. After this documentation process, teams of 11 people (researchers, investigators, a photographer, translators and a cameraman) are sent to Eastern Europe to interview eyewitnesses to these crimes and to locate the mass graves of the victims. The work done by YIU rests upon on the assumption that the mass shootings of Jews by the Nazis and their collaborators were not done in secret. These crimes were often conducted in public, in broad daylight.