Desbois, a French Catholic priest, has devoted his life to confronting anti-Semitism and furthering Catholic-Jewish understanding. Since 2001 he and his team have crisscrossed the Ukrainian countryside in an effort to locate every mass grave and site at which Jews were killed during the Holocaust. Co-presented with Claremont McKenna College's Center for the Study of the Holocaust, Genocide, and Human Rights
Father Patrick Desbois is a Roman Catholic Priest and Advisor to the Vatican on Jewish relations. He has spent the last five years leading investigative teams to the Ukraine and Belarus in order to find the missing mass graves of the 1.5 million Jews killed outside their homes during the Holocaust. Father Desbois has interviewed over 900 surviving eye-witnesses and discovered over 800 killing sites in his effort to uncover this missing chapter of Holocaust history, discount Holocaust deniers and give the fallen a respectful burial. Father Desbois has received worldwide acclaim for his work including honorary doctorates from Hebrew University and Bar Ilan, and awards from the US Holocaust Memorial Museum, French President Nicolas Sarkozy, B'nai Brith and the ADL. His book, Holocaust By Bullets, was recently awarded the National Jewish Book Award. Louise Steinman is curator of ALOUD at Central Library and co-director of the Los Angeles Institute for the Humanities at USC. She is the author of two books: The Souvenir: A Daughter Discovers Her Father's War and The Knowing Body: The Artist as Storyteller in Contemporary Performance. She is working on a book about Poland. www.louisesteinman.com