The Holocaust by Bullets: A Priest's Journey to Uncover the Truth Behind the Murder of 1.5 Million Jews [Hardcover]

In "The Holocaust by Bullets," Father Patrick Desbois, a French Roman Catholic priest, embarks on a sacred mission with the help of many others who are also deeply committed to the ideals of truth and justice. His goal is to uncover the facts concerning the slaughter of roughly 1.5 million Jews in the former Soviet Union by the Nazis and those who collaborated with them. Among the murdered were many young women and children, as well as the elderly. The Jews were usually transported by cart to an area within or just outside the villages where they lived and then made to undress before they were shot and thrown into pits.

Father Desbois and his team traveled to such towns as Rawa-Ruska, Lisinitchi, Busk, Khvativ, and Ternivka to videotape the testimony of often reluctant witnesses who, even after more than six decades, still remember every detail of the massacres that they observed. Their testimony, along with microfilmed documents stored in the archives of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, is bringing renewed attention to "an ocean of extermination" that reached across the Ukraine.

Desbois had heard stories about the Second World War from his relatives, and he was especially riveted by the anecdotes of his grandfather, Claudius, who was imprisoned by the Germans in 1942. Claudius proclaimed that no matter how much he suffered, "it was worse for the others!" Patrick later found out that "the others" were the Jews who were methodically exterminated in villages and towns in full view of their non-Jewish friends and neighbors.

This book is a nightmarish look at man's inhumanity to man. One by one, those who remain speak about what they saw: Jews being hauled away, forced to undress and remove their valuables, shot in the back of their heads, thrown into a ditch, and either burned or covered with lime or sand. Often, the ground moved for days afterwards, since many of the victims were buried alive. Sadly, there is usually no memorial to mark where most of these atrocities occurred, since the Germans attempted to eradicate any sign of the genocide that they had perpetrated. Desbois's team used metal detectors to find cartridges left behind by the Germans to pinpoint killing sites. This information, along with the statements of local villagers and data from historical records, has led to the discovery of many heretofore unidentified locations where Jews were exterminated.

Adding to the impact of this powerful narrative are color photographs of the killing fields and of the people whose memories fill these pages. Father Desbois is to be commended for his compassion and determination in undertaking an arduous, painstaking, and emotionally traumatic task. He has confronted terrible horrors that must have shaken his belief in man's essential goodness, but he has persisted--not only to create "awareness of the barbarity and wrong of what occurred, but also [to] prevent future genocides."

I just finished this book. I was doing research at the Holocaust Museum and picked it up in the gift shop. I read it all the way through today. At times I felt like crying. I am somewhat hardened, I thought, to these stories. I was wrong.

The book becomes a little overwhelming in the repetitiveness of the stories of death of the innocent by the uncaring. The stories of people being buried alive. The pits moving for days afterwards as the bodies decayed and those still alive struggled.

These are not new stories to those familiar with the mass killings in the east. Yet in this book they are brought to life by his interviews with eyewitnesses. Children who watched as their neighbors were shot in groups.

What is different is here you read about entire village populations being enlisted in the mass murder. Someone had to cook for the Germans; pull the gold teeth; dig, and then fill in the pits. Children were forcibly conscripted to sort the freshly dead Jews clothes. As one villager said "One day we woke up, and we were all wearing the Jews clothes." Now the mass graves are grown over and unmarked. Unlike the cemeteries of the German war dead which are still carefully tended.

A story of a noble endeavor.

The "Holocaust by bullets" is an exceptional book on two grounds. Firstly, it gives an insight into a very major and under-researched aspect of the Holocaust, the killing of an estimated 1,500,000 Jews by the Einsatzgruppen (mobile killing squads) and their local helpers.This particularly brutal chapter remains largely unknown to the general public, even those who are familiar with the operation of the Vernichtungslagern (Death Camps of Chelmno, Auschwitz, Treblinka, Belzec, Sobibor and Majdanek, the Ghettos (particularly the Warsaw Ghetto) and the Konzentratzionslagern (Dachau, Matthausen,Bergen-Belsen, Grose Rosen and innumerable others). Secondly, it tells the story as it really was: I know, because I have (just) lived through it. It is a tremendous achievement on the part of the author, a "simple" French priest from la France profonde with no relevant academic background, armed only with an exceptional conscience and a remarkable personality. This book is a must for anyone seriously interested in the Holocaust, but I must warn any prospective reader: this is a harrowing story.
S.Sternhell, Sydney, Australia

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