Yahad – In Unum (‘together’ in Hebrew and ‘in one’ in Latin) is a French non-governmental organisation founded in 2004 by the Catholic priest Father Patrick Desbois (born 1955). Dedicated to the study of genocide and mass violence, the organisation is best known for its pioneering work on the ‘Holocaust by bullets’. Between 1941 and 1944, German units and local auxiliaries shot over two million Jews in the Eastern European territories, mainly in the occupied Soviet republics. The shootings began in the early days of ‘Operation Barbarossa’, the code name for the German invasion of the Soviet Union launched on 22 June 1941, and continued despite the existence of Auschwitz-Birkenau and other extermination camps.
Father Desbois initiated his investigations during a visit to Rava-Rus′ka, a town in present-day Western Ukraine, where he sought to trace the history of Stalag 325, the notoriously brutal camp in which his grandfather had been interned as a French prisoner of war. This initial engagement with local eyewitnesses prompted him to undertake large scale documentation of mass shootings in Eastern Europe during World War II.
Field Work in Central and Eastern Europe
The work carried out by Yahad-In Unum is based on the premise that the systematic massacres of Jews perpetrated by the Nazis and their auxiliaries in the East were not committed in secret. These crimes were very often carried out in public, in broad daylight, in the view of neighbours. Some witnesses are still alive, willing to tell their stories and to have their testimonies recorded on video. For almost two decades, Father Desbois and his teams have been scouring the towns and villages of Central and Eastern Europe to interview these witnesses and locate the mass graves of the Holocaust.
As part of this fieldwork, the organisation also documents the crimes committed in these territories against other groups persecuted by Nazi units, including Roma, Soviet prisoners of war, and patients in psychiatric hospitals. Yahad – In Unum has identified over 3,373 shooting sites, interviewing more than 8,183 eyewitnesses to the massacres in ten countries (Belarus, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Moldova, Poland, Romania, Russia, Slovakia and Ukraine).
Documenting Crimes against Roma
The research of Yahad – In Unum into the genocide of Roma concerns two main areas: the mass shootings in Eastern occupied territories and the deportation from Romania to Transnistria.
A December 2009 research mission in western Russia marked the beginning of Yahad – In Unum’s investigation into the genocide of Roma. Father Desbois and his team investigated the village of Aleksandrovka, in the Smolensk oblast bordering Belarus, where, according to a study by the Extraordinary State Commission, on 24 April 1942, 176 ‘Gypsies’ had been killed.1State Archives of the Russian Federation [Gosudarstvennyi arkhiv Rossiiskoi Federatsii, GARF], 7021-44/1091. Yahad – In Unum investigators, young Russians and Belarussians, began knocking on the doors of the village to find witnesses to the massacre.
The team interviewed four witnesses, including Rom Sergei G., who lived near the crime scene and told his memories of the shooting.2Yahad – In Unum, testimony 60R, recorded on 2 December 2009 in the village of Aleksandrovka, Smolensk region, Russia. During the interview, the survivor showed the team the sites related to the genocide: the Roma school that was burned down by the Germans during the occupation, the assembly place by the lake, the location of the barn where the victims were forced to undress, and the killing site where the 176 Roma men, women, and children were murdered. Thanks to the archives and testimonies of Sergei G. and other residents interviewed in Aleksandrovka, a Yahad – In Unum team reconstructed for the first time the step-by-step massacre of a Roma community in the occupied Soviet territories.3Moutier, “The genocide of the Roma people in the former Soviet Union and Romania.”
December 2009 saw the systematisation of the organisation’s investigation into the genocide of Roma in the East, especially in Roma kolkhozes. Large-scale research was also carried out by Father Desbois’ teams on the shootings of Roma in Polish territories occupied by Nazi Germany. By cross-referencing witness testimonies with archival records, Yahad has documented 114 shooting sites of Roma in villages of Belarus, Estonia, Poland, Latvia, Russia, Slovakia and Ukraine and interviewed over 435 witnesses to the massacres in these countries.
The Witnesses
Notably, the Yahad-In Unum collection focusing on the massacres of Roma communities in the occupied territories of the Soviet Union and Poland is distinctive in that it consists predominantly of testimonies from neighbours of the killing sites.
In the initial phases of investigations led by Father Desbois and his teams, the recorded witnesses were often individuals, both men and women, who as young adults were requisitioned for tasks such as digging pits before shootings, filling in mass graves, or preparing meals for the execution units. The interviewees who testify now, more than eighty years later, were mostly children or teenagers at the time of the murders. They may have been curious children or accidental witnesses, grazing their cows during the shootings, for example. They represent a significant proportion of the testimonies collected by the organisation about the killing sites.
Unmarked Graves
As in the case of the victims of the Shoah, the Soviet authorities often chose not to specify the origin of the victims on memorials located at sites where Roma were shot. The case of Aleksandrovka—where at least one memorial stone with a general inscription was erected in 1982—is not, however, entirely representative of the situation of memorials located at massacre sites. Indeed, the majority of the 114 sites located by Yahad – In Unum were, at the time of the fieldwork, abandoned in forests, swamps, cemeteries, or ravines, without the slightest trace of commemoration.
Today, this investigative work is a race against time. Local witnesses are often the last people able to locate the killing sites. The witnesses are growing older and fewer in number. The organisation’s aim is to continue its investigations so that the memory of the many murdered Roma communities does not fade with the disappearance of these last living witnesses.
Survivors of the Deportations to Transnistria
Since 2011, Yahad – In Unum’s research teams have been collecting testimonies from survivors of the deportations of Roma to Transnistria Governate, which the regime of Ion Antonescu (1882–1946) had ordered for the summer and early fall of 1942. In the interviews, the survivors share their experiences of deportation. They described arrests, the journey, starvation, diseases, forced labour, the conditions of life in the camps, and the daily violence and killings that Roma were subjected to by Romanian soldiers and local helpers.
The testimonies are particularly relevant concerning the role of the local Romanian authorities, especially the mayors, in the deportation or the non-deportation of local communities to Transnistria. Sexual violence in Transnistria is also a recurring theme in survivors’ stories.
In addition to documenting the experiences of individuals deported to Transnistria, the collection of testimonies is an important source of information about the pre-war period, relationships with neighbours, differences and similarities between Roma who had been labelled ‘nomadic’ or ‘sedentary’, and the lives and traditions of groups such as Kalderaša, Rudari, Lingurari, and others. The investigation illustrates that the lives and traditions of the same ethnic groups varied from one region to another, due to historical contexts and geographical positions. Deportation policies differed as well. Through the personal history of Roma deported by the Antonescu government, as well as those who were not deported, the investigation revealed the complexity of the deportation process and the mechanisms of persecution.
Investigation in the Republic of North Macedonia
With the aim of documenting the fate of the Roma during World War II within the current borders of the Republic of North Macedonia, a field mission was conducted in April 2014, focusing on the region of Skopje and the eastern and northeastern parts of the country. The scarcity of archives on the history of the Roma in the region made this field mission especially relevant for documenting their experiences during the war. Initial investigations were carried out in Šuto Orizari (commonly referred to as Šutka), a district with a large Roma population, established after the 1963 earthquake to provide housing for displaced Roma families.
Over ten research days, forty-two testimonies were video-recorded, providing detailed insight into the daily life of local Roma, predominantly Muslim, their culture, and their living conditions prior to the war, as well as documenting their trajectories under Bulgarian occupation. Key findings of the mission included systematic abuses and humiliation of Roma by Bulgarian and German forces, attempted executions, and sexual violence against women. Additionally, testimonies revealed Roma participation in local resistance groups, contributing to a more nuanced and comprehensive understanding of their history in the area during World War II.4For more information about the investigation in the Republic of North Macedonia, see Umansky and Nastasie, “Giving the Roma Survivors a Voice.”
Intergenerational Discourses
In July 2011, a Yahad – In Unum team took two survivors of the deportations to Transnistria, including Mita Serban (born 1937), to the villages that they were deported from. Mita Serban is from a family living in the Romanian village of Burila. They had to abandon their house and animals and were taken to Kovalivka, a village in Transnistria near the Bug river.
Mita Serban remembers in particular the famine and cold, but also the executions carried out by the Volksdeutsche guards. The investigation in Kovalivka, which belongs today to Ukraine, enabled the team to locate not only the camp but also the mass grave where the bodies of Roma who died during deportation or were shot were dumped: The grave is located in the garden of a Kovalivka resident’s house. There is no monument. Mita Serban survived the deportation thanks to her mother, who hid some jewels and bartered them for food with local peasants.
Mita Serban is the grandmother of Catalin Serban, a young Rom from Gârla Mare, in the Oltenia region of Romania. Together with Costel Nastasie, another young man from the same village community, Catalin Serban has been working with Yahad – In Unum since the start of the organisation’s investigations in Romania. Grandchildren of deportees, they now coordinate teams of young Roma who are conducting field research in Romania and Moldova into the deportation of Roma communities to Transnistria. They seek out witnesses and conduct interviews. The interviews are recorded in Romanes or Romanian, with a consecutive translation into French. Twelve research trips in Romania and eight in Moldova have enabled the organisation to collect more than 160 testimonies of Roma survivors.
Presentation of the Results
Following initial field research in Romania, Costel Nastasie opened a documentation centre on the Roma genocide in Brussels. The results of investigations into deportations to the Transnistria Governorate, as well as shootings in the Eastern territories, are accessible there, and also at the organisation’s research centre just north of Paris. An online platform is currently being created to enable the public to consult the 595 testimonies recorded by the research teams in the field.5Cf. https://intestimony.yiu.ngo/ [accessed: 18/11/2025]. It is one of many actions undertaken by the organisation to raise awareness of the history of the Roma genocide.
In 2016, the association teamed up with the specialist journal Etudes Tsiganes to publish a special issue on the subject entitled ‘Territories of Extermination in Eastern Europe’. The same year, Yahad – In Unum inaugurated ‘Roma Memory’, an exhibition about the genocide of Roma, which travelled in different European countries, and was displayed at institutions such as the European Commission and the Paris City Hall.
For more than a decade, the researchers of the organisation have been training several hundred European teachers every year about the fate of Roma during World War II. Yahad – In Unum’s project has multiple objectives: to transmit the history of persecution to Roma to establish their right to dignity today, to teach all Europeans the history of the genocide of the Roma, and to fight the persistent racism against Roma today.
