The Nazi killers hired these German companies to move the bodies to mass graves. People must understand, Rava Ruska was a huge killing centre: first for the Jews, then for political prisoners, and then for the local population and the Roma. Each person who was killed here was an individual. We cannot forget this.'
Some 32,000 were buried around Rava Ruska and in neighbouring towns like Bakhiv, where for years farmers have dug up human remains - and in so doing found mass graves - as they ploughed the fields.
One veteran Tikhon Leshchuk, now 89, recalled how his father, a priest, hid a Jewish girl in their house throughout Nazi occupation.
'On 27 June 1941, German troops came into Rava Ruska. The solders destroyed the Jewish cemetery and soon made a Jewish ghetto in the town centre.
'The market square and the Jewish quarters around it became a ghetto. All the Jews from Rava Ruska and the near by villages were brought there,' he said.
His best friend at school - a Jew - suddenly vanished, presumably shot by the Nazis.
One day when we were in the village my father's friend came. She was a Jew and she brought her 10 year old girl and asked my father to let her stay with us.
'My father agree and Anna, the girl, hid with us all through the years of German rule. I'm not sure what happened with her mother but Anna survived and later became a school teacher in Rava Ruska.'
A witness from Bakhiv, Temofis Ryzvanuk, then 14, told him how Germans beat the Jews with whips to force them to dig the holes into which they would be buried.
'We were so afraid of the Germans. They had things on their caps, they were terrifying.
'My father's brother said: "Don't be afraid, no one is going to kill you. They're only killing Jews. And they realized that they were going to be killed".
They stripped them naked, men and women. When they had killed them, they put them beside each other, head to head, to pile in as many as possible, to save space. The Germans had automatic rifles and when they got close to the pit they shot them.'
Temofis described the bloody execution as a 'production line' that was 'so well organised' that it only took a few minutes for everyone to be killed.
'They had barely got out when they fell and were pushed in and piled together, head to head like herrings. Then the next wagon-load arrived, and then the next,' he said.
They stripped them naked, men and women. When they had killed them, they put them beside each other, head to head, to pile in as many as possible, to save space. The Germans had automatic rifles and when they got close to the pit they shot them
Temofis Ryzvanuk, witness of mass killing of Jews in Ukraine
Desbois warned: 'A whole part of the genocide has not been declared.
The challenge is to collect the maximum amount of evidence about the killing of the Jews in these countries and find out about the mass graves.
'Tomorrow the witnesses will disappear and the deniers will overreact, saying that the Jews falsified the story.
'I always say, the Holocaust was not a tsunami. It was a crime. And when there's a crime you have evidence. It's very easy to find evidence in these villages.'
In all, more one million Ukrainian Jews were murdered by Hitler's troops, and Father Desbois and his humanitarian organisation Yahad, in Unum, are seeking to identify the sites and erect memorials but also to help relatives track where their ancestors were slain, and now lie buried.
'Twenty five years ago, I learned that in Rava Ruska there was a camp where 25,000 Soviet prisoners were killed by the Germans,' he said in this village, once a thriving town with 42 per cent of its population Jewish.
'There was a memorial for the Soviet prisoners. But there were no memorials for the mass graves of the Jews.'
He had now ensured there is a memorial here - erected in May this year - and that the graves, and the memory of what happened are protected.
But it was his experience in Rava Ruska - which was also on the main railway line to the death camp of Belzec in Nazi-occupied Poland where up to 600,000 were exterminated in gas chambers - that led him to expand his search across the country.
'We want to show that we will come back.' he said.
'We will come back to the last grave where they killed the Jews... We have a duty to victims because each and every one of them had a name.'
He has estimated that there may be another 6,000 sites still to find, reported Deutsche Welle.
Elsewhere in Ukraine, he heard from Nikola Kristitch, who was aged eight in 1942, when he saw a vision of hell that haunted him for the rest of his life.
He was hiding in the trees when he saw dead children being thrown by hand into a pit - a mass grave.
Adults 'were completely naked and walked with the Rabbi at their head. He gave a sermon, to all those who were already there. And the cars kept coming, there were more and more people and they went into the pit in rows. They all lay down like herrings.
'They lay down and there was one sub-machine gun and two Germans, they had the skull and crossbones on their caps. They fired a burst at the people lying there, and then more went in and another burst.
'They kept shooting them until nightfall. And we watched. Then the Germans went back again to get the villagers to cover the grave. People hid to escape doing it. And us kids, we hid in the bushes, out of curiosity, to see.
'That night, the people covered it in, but the ground was still moving, for another two days. The ground heaved. I remembered one of the girls, a young girl. Her panties were around her ankles.
A German fired at her and her hair caught fire. She screamed and he took an automatic rifle, got into the grave and fired.
'The bullet ricocheted off his knee and he bled everywhere. He bandaged his knee, he was half undressed and then he emptied his round. He even killed Jews who still had their clothes on, he couldn't wait he was so crazed with rage. He fired at everybody, he was crazy.'
A sign of what was to come under the Germans was seen in the Lviv Pogrom of June 1941 immediately after the Nazi entered the city after pushing out the Red Army.
A Ukrainian mob, eagerly backed by the new occupiers, stripped and beat Jewish women in the streets who were subjected to public humiliation.
This was part of an orgy of anti-Semitic violence that included beatings and killings which led to the deaths of 4,000 Jews in Lviv (also known as Lvov), which is 31 miles south-east of Rava Ruska.
'The topic of the Holocaust was almost banned in Soviet times,' Mikhail Tyaglyy, historian of the Ukrainian Centre of Holocaust Study, told MailOnline.
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