It’s a quest that has seen the 53-year-old French-Catholic priest return to the region repeatedly since 2004 with a minivan and a small crew to interview aging eyewitnesses about the horrors they witnessed as children and teenagers, and to document in the most authoritative way to date where  graves are located so that they can be decently marked.

Acquiring the testimonies of those eyewitnesses who either willingly or by coercion collaborated with the Nazi Einsatzgruppen mobile units assigned to track down every Jew in every Ukrainian village has amounted to a vast, difficult undertaking, often characterized by rutted village roads, harsh weather conditions, and long rides to the far reaches of the peasant countryside.

But speaking at a press conference a day prior to appearing at the inaugural event of this year’s Montreal Holocaust Memorial Centre (MHMC) Holocaust Education Series, Father Desbois was resolute that his work will continue unabated.

“There is only a seven- to eight-year window to do this, because all these witnesses will be gone,” Father Desbois said during his first visit to Canada, referring to the sense of increasing urgency attached to his work.

“I am doing this mainly for three reasons: to make sure these people are properly buried, to establish the truth and to transmit to future generations what genocides do. This was not a natural disaster like a tsunami.”

He added: “I do it because there are dead who were never found or buried, and no tombstone. They just disappeared.”

Father Desbois uses the term “Holocaust of bullets” to differentiate between the way Jews were killed en masse at death camps such as Auschwitz and how the Jews of Ukraine and Belarus perished – by single bullets fired into their heads or backs “to save ammunition.”

If that didn’t work, they were buried alive.

Holocaust of Bullets is also the title of the recently released English translation of his 2007 book, Porteur de mémoires.

To date, Father Desbois said he has recorded the testimonies of more than 700 witnesses and uncovered the specific locations of about 850 sites where Jews died one by one. Often the sites are right in the middle of town squares. He corroborates locations by independently confirming and cross-checking them with other witnesses.

The fact that Father Desbois wears a clerical collar, he suggested, seems to make villagers less reluctant to open up to him about the horrors they witnessed or were part of – secrets they have held onto for decades but that they now seem anxious to get off their chests before they die, almost, in some cases, as a final act of contrition.

Often they ask him what took him so long to get there, he said.

“I judge no one,” Father Desbois said. “If anyone remembers, they can help us. I am only looking for the facts.”

Father Desbois’ journey to Ukraine and beyond – he is also conducting similar research in Belarus, where 700,000 Jews died and has plans to expand the work to Russia – began with his own grandfather, a French Resistance fighter who himself was deported to Ukraine and later told his grandson about how Jews there were systematically executed.

In fact, it was in the very Ukrainian town that his grandfather had been deported to – Rava-Ruska – where Father Desbois’ voyage of discovery began while he was visiting there in 2002.

In 2004, Father Desbois established – along with the late, Jewish-born archbishop of Paris, Cardinal Jean-Marie Lustiger – the Paris-based organization Yahad-In Unum (which means “together” in Hebrew and Latin), an initiative to identify and document all the sites of the mass executions of Jews in Ukraine.

The project is being financed by the Fondation pour la mémoire de la Shoah, the Conference of Material Claims against Germany, the Targum Shlishi Foundation, and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

Some of the results of Father Desbois’ research, such as photographs, shell casings and the like, are on display at the Memorial of the Shoah in Paris’ Jewish quarter, the Marais. Father Desbois also heads the Commission for Relations with Judaism of the French Bishops’ Conference and is a consultant to the Vatican on Jewish religion.

At the press conference, Father Desbois said that the work, exhausting as it is, will require more support and funding. The annual budget is about $800,000, but he said he needs about triple that amount to continue, especially as the project expands beyond Ukraine farther into Belarus and eventually Russia.

In total, Father Desbois thinks that the remains of perhaps two million people lie unclaimed beneath the soil of those lands.

“But they are not lost,” he said.

In some cases, as he was told by one villager, “they are buried in our garden.”