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Rebecca Erbelding: I'm here to talk about a collection of rings that were donated by
Father Patrick Desbois in 2008. And these were rings that were found when he was excavating
a mass grave in the area of Busk in the Ukraine. According to Father Desbois, these rings were
found in a cluster located not too far away from one of the mass graves. We really don’t
know much about how they were left there, whether this was a situation in which the
people who were about to be killed took off their rings and threw them as a way of keeping
them from the Nazis who would've used them, shipped them back to Germany, melted them
down, reappropriated them in some way as a valuable; or whether they just weren't picked
up when the murderers came through and really confiscated belongings. I think it’s really
hard for us to tell the story of the 1.5 million people for whom we don't really have a names
list--they're not on deportation lists, they're not on lists of people in concentration camps--because
for them the Holocaust was over in a matter of days for the most part. Many of these towns,
the Nazis would come in, or their collaborators would come in, do a round-up and then there
would be some sort of mass killing, mass shooting in the nearby area. And so because it happened
so quickly, you know, they don't show up on deportation lists, they don't show up on names
lists. They're killed in the vicinity of their town. And it's really important to kind of
try to get at that story however we can, and it's difficult because we don't have the back
story of, you know, "This is my family’s material. This is my family’s story"--because
for the most part families were killed in their entireties. So there are no survivors
to come forward and tell this story. There are no survivors of this particular town or
this particular area. Or if there are it's only a handful of people. These rings are
so poignant in a way. Many people wear rings. Many people have rings. And in a way I think
the anonymity of these rings--the fact that we don’t know who they belong to, we don’t
know the story behind them, all we know is that they belonged to someone who was killed
in one of the mass graves in Busk--I think that makes these rings and the story behind
them really important for us to tell.