Father Desbois works as a minister, traveling through regions of the USSR like Ukraine, Belarus, and Russia. He prays for people and listens to their problems, offering help when he can. Most people who seek his services are the elderly or the poor. During his ministry, Desbois becomes overwhelmed with sadness for the people who all talk about how burdened they are by their memories of WWII. In response, he conducts some research and catalogues sites where people suspect mass burial sights of murdered Jews lie in the region. These locations include remote villages and border towns, places which receive few guests.
When the Germans marched east, they executed any Jews they found, also the Romany people. These murders were not the same as the systematic killings in western Europe. Actually, most of these people were shot in the back, without warning or ceremony. Their deaths meant nothing to the soldiers, but their very lives were apparently offensive to these troops. After the murders, they placed the bodies in mass grave sites which remained unlabelled and often undocumented.
Father Desbois finds several important grave sites during his research. He tracks down these sites in order to offer the deceased proper burials, with documentation. Along the way, he has many first-hand encounters with people who remember this neighbor who was executed or that Jewish friend who disappeared. They inform him how stringent the German regulations for these killings actually were. Because the army was suffering from underfunding and lack of time, they were allowed only one bullet per victim, demanding a highly efficient killing squad. Most of these witnesses were children at the time. Some of them even were taken from their families at gunpoint and forced to work at these grave sites. With no mercy, the soldiers ordered these children to trod down the bodies into the pits so that more could be added. They used lime and ash to absorb blood in order to minimize the visibility of these graves. Through Father Desbois' counseling and genuine care for their experiences, these people are granted some respite from their trauma. They are relieved to learn that those victims will be honored in death as they weren't allowed in life.
