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."
