have been completely forgotten, without protection or memorial. The last persons who know where the victims were buried are the eyewitnesses, of whom there are ever fewer due to their age. In their late 80s or 90s today, they are slowly passing away, the memory of the victims disappearing with them. YIU plans to lead 20 research trips to Eastern Europe in 2018.
Exposing evidence of the crimes
From January 15 to January 19, 2018, YIU researchers came to Oświęcim to conduct a week long “Holocaust By Bullets Training” program specially designed for the guides of the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum. The event was opened by Father Desbois. “This method of killing Jewish men, women and children, village by village, and leaving them in mass graves was systematically employed by the Nazis in Eastern Europe. Each killer saw his victim, each victim saw his killer,” explained Father Desbois. “Unfortunately, this is the same method being used today in the mass crimes which continue to take lives of innocent groups of people across the world”. After the opening lecture, Patrice Bensimon, YIU Research Director, Michał Chojak, YIU Deputy Research Director - who between them have interviewed thousands of eyewitnesses to the Holocaust by Bullets - and Renata Skuńczyk, YIU educator, provided a series of presentations and workshops focusing on the mass killings of Jews perpetrated by German mobile units in former Soviet territories after the launch of Operation Barbarossa.
During the training, the guides became familiar with the particular investigative methodology of the organization and had the opportunity to learn directly from the archival sources and the collection of testimonies recorded by Yahad teams in the field. The work around the crimes perpetrated in thousands of villages, towns and cities, was the core of the training program created by YIU. Throughout the week-long program different topics were discussed, ranging from the chronology of the Holocaust by Bullets to the photographs of the genocide, from the geography of the massacres to the different stages of the crime. 130 guides of the Museum took part in Level I of the training and had the opportunity to deepen their knowledge on the mass shootings of over 2 million Jews by mobile Nazi death squads and their collaborators in Eastern Europe.