Patrick Desbois. The Holocaust by Bullets: A Priest's Journey to Uncover the Truth Behind the Murder of 1.5 Million Jews. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008. 272 pp. $26.95 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-230-60617-3.

Reviewed by Kyle Jantzen (Ambrose University College)
Published on H-German (July, 2009)
Commissioned by Susan R. Boettcher

Uncovering the Holocaust in Ukraine

The Holocaust by Bullets is a powerful, if unusual, book. Neither research monograph nor memoir, it describes the efforts of French priest Patrick Desbois to uncover the nature and scope of the Holocaust in Ukraine, as well chronicling Desbois's own path into Holocaust research. It is comprised not only of the narrative of Desbois's efforts and findings, but also contains several transcripts from among the hundreds of interviews Desbois conducted with Ukrainian peasants along with sixteen pages of color pictures of killing sites, Ukrainian peasants, and spent cartridges he and his team found as evidence of the mass murder of Jews. The result is a book aimed at the general reader or undergraduate student that communicates both the brutality of the German mobile killing units (Einsatzgruppen) that annihilated Jews and the deep trauma they generated in towns and villages across Ukraine. Desbois also serves historians of the Holocaust, complementing German and Russian archival material with oral history, in the process corroborating much of the early Soviet account of the mass murder of Jews in eastern Europe and putting a human face on the detached perpetrator reports so common to Holocaust histories. Indeed, Desbois has consulted with scholars from Europe, Israel, and North America, and the book was published with the support of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. 

In the early chapters of the book, most of the attention falls on Desbois and his journey toward the study of the Holocaust, beginning with his childhood in France. His extended family inculcated in him a deep sense of responsibility for other people and a strong awareness of the need for justice, and left with him their memories of the Second World War and the French Resistance. Along the way, vigorous debates took place between Catholic and atheist members of his family about the relevance of Christianity in a world of such evil. Converted to Christianity during his university years, Desbois travelled to India to work with Mother Theresa's mission to the poor, entered the Roman Catholic priesthood, and later traveled to Africa to teach mathematics. On a trip to Poland during the Christmas season of 1990, Desbois realized he was not far from the site of the former Rawa-Ruska camp in Ukraine, where his grandfather had been held prisoner. This moment became for him a revelatory one, at which he began to see the Holocaust as a personal responsibility (p. 15). As a result, Desbois entered into a period of preparation, studying Hebrew, attending annual seminars at Yad Vashem, and learning about Jews and Judaism from colleagues in France. He led a Holocaust study trip to eastern Europe, and came to realize that witnesses were still alive who had seen the camps and ghettos, and the mass murders perpetrated in Poland and Ukraine. Along the way, Desbois became secretary to the French Conference of Bishops for relations with Judaism, advisor to the Cardinal-Archbishop of Lyon, and advisor to the Vatican on the Jewish religion. Some readers may find this autobiographical beginning to be a distraction, while others will find it helps them understand the zeal behind the French priest's efforts. At the very least, it constitutes a proper admission that an author's own experiences and presuppositions shape the work he or she engages in.

Desbois's search for Rawa-Ruska and his journeys to other Ukrainian mass murder sites led to a series of discoveries he describes in narrative form. He soon found, for instance, that many sites where Nazis had exterminated large groups of Jews were officially invisible, with no markers or memorials. Near Lviv, for instance, at least 90,000 Jews were killed in the Lisinitchi Forest, yet  no public sign marks that event today (p. 111). At other locations, where memorials commemorating the massacres had been erected, they were often placed some distance away from the actual killing sites. One important breakthrough for Desbois and his team was the realization that killing sites could be discovered by means of metal detectors--a high concentration of spent cartridges (German ones were labelled by year and place of manufacture) meant that they had found the precise location of a mass grave. Desbois also periodically encountered obstructionism from Ukrainian peasants who did not want to acknowledge the massacres. When he persisted in asking the villagers or produced archival evidence demonstrating that massacres had taken place, however, the stories came tumbling out.

What he learned from elderly Ukrainians reveals not only the depravity of the Einsatzgruppen, Order Police, and Wehrmacht units engaged in the killing, but also the deep trauma suffered by Ukrainians forced to watch their Jewish neighbors, business associates, schoolmates, and friends being murdered or (worse still) compelled to assist the killers in their task. For the most part, Desbois concludes that the callous readiness of the Nazis to kill when faced with any opposition, no matter how slight, created a terror that cowed most villagers into silence or cooperation--few dared to attempt to rescue the Jews living in their midst. Indeed, Desbois's interviews reveal just how common it was for the German forces to conscript Ukrainians to assist in the task of mass murder. In perhaps the most disturbing section of the book, Desbois catalogs the various forms of Ukrainian engagement in the Holocaust. Civilians were ordered to dig burial pits, to cart Jews to execution sites, or to carry the bodies of Jews from killing sites to mass graves. Other Ukrainians were made to stand guard over Jews who were about to be killed, to pull out the Jews' gold teeth just before execution, or to walk back and forth across the bodies of dead and wounded Jews so as to compact the piles of corpses. Still others were recruited to supply sand and lime to killing sites, to shovel it over the dead and dying bodies, to supply or spread out the hemp and sunflowers used to burn corpses, or to spread ash over the sites as part of the clean-up. Finally, civilians were also forced to cook for the killers, to provide lodging for the members of Einsatzgruppen, to store shovels and other implements used in the killing process, and to gather, sort, and mend clothing and other possessions left behind by Jews and reused or sold by the Germans. As Desbois discovered, most villagers were commanded to perform such duties at gunpoint. Even more significantly, he asserts repeatedly that "most of them were children" (pp. 66, 75, 81, 84, and 97).

In a great many cases, the mass murder of Jews took place right in Ukrainian villages, especially when partisan operations made the forests unsafe for the Germans. In one village, a man led Desbois to the edge of a wide lawn, declaring the ground nearby to be the local execution site and adding that he had watched the killings from twenty meters away. At that point in the conversation, other villagers came running up to Desbois, aware of the subject of the conversation. One interrupted, exclaiming, "My vegetable allotment patch. That's my vegetable patch! Leave our gardens alone" (p. 65). As Desbois observed, "Without realizing it, with their protestations they were only confirming what everyone in the area knew: the bodies of shot Jews were resting under the tomato plants" (p. 65). During those killing operations, any enclosed space could become a temporary prison, one of the "antechambers to death" (p. 98). Silos, granaries, wells, ditches, schools, town halls, synagogues, wine cellars, police stations, shops, pigsties, chicken coops, and stables were all employed either as holding cages or killing sites. In other cases, Jews were shot in the streets right outside the homes of villagers--homes in which many of those witnesses have lived ever since, silently carrying the trauma of those experiences throughout their lives. The most graphic example of this trauma was the assertion, made over and over by the Ukrainians Desbois interviewed, that the killing sites "breathed" for three days, as the ground moved over the bodies of those who were only wounded, but gradually died of weakness, suffocation, or injury (p. 65).

Time and again, Desbois's interviews with Ukrainian villagers reveal the excessive cruelty of Germans and (though less so) of Ukrainians. In one especially gruesome incident, Germans trapped Jews in the cellar under the marketplace in the village of Sataniv, walling them in to die there. For four days, the villagers had to wait until the ground stopped moving and silence returned to the market. In another village called Strusiv, the Nazis organized a kind of black Passover, instructing villagers to post crosses outside their doors and then killing all those who lived in homes without crosses. In yet another community, Bertniki, it was a local Ukrainian man who exploited the plight of Jews, offering to hide them but then smothering them with quilts during the night. Though Ukrainians were at times complicit in the mass murder of the Jews, Desbois's account suggests this was the exception rather than the rule. More often, he finds, members of the local non-Jewish population had little choice but to stand aside or even aid the killing process, lest they be caught up in it themselves. Readers who have been convinced by the work of Timothy Snyder, Martin Dean, or Omar Bartov might question this conclusion, however, and it would have been good had Desbois connected his findings on the ground to those of researchers working in the archives.

Several times, Father Desbois explains his motivation for the difficult task of documenting the Holocaust in Ukraine. Certainly, the problem of evil has been in the forefront of his mind: "I am convinced that there is only one human race--a human race that shoots two-year-old children. For better or worse I belong to that human race and this allows me to acknowledge that an ideology can deceive minds to the point of annihilating all ethical reflexes and all recognition of the human in the other" (p. 67). For Desbois, it is not enough simply to affirm or to declare truth. Rather, people must be committed to developing a "deep conscience," because "conscience is a fragile entity" (p. 68). Moreover, he sees his work as an act of justice towards the victims of National Socialism and a deterrent against future mass murder. Sooner or later, he argues, someone will uncover the roots of a genocide, no matter who the killers were.

The Holocaust by Bullets is an extremely personal book. Desbois closes his account by returning in his mind to Rawa-Ruska, the camp where his grandfather was a prisoner and which sparked his initial interest in the Holocaust. After reproducing the text of a testimony about French prisoners of war digging pits for the execution of Jews, he remembers his grandfather and ponders "a question that will not leave me alone: Did he see it?" (p. 213). Such a personal story as this one begs for more contextual information. One might have wished for an introductory or concluding chapter outlining the course of the Holocaust in Ukraine, with more background on Einsatzgruppen C and D and a sense of how Desbois's work fits into the current research on this mobile phase of the Holocaust. Teachers will want to use this book as a supplement to (though not a replacement for) conventional Holocaust texts or other new works.[1] That said, Desbois's book serves as a moving introduction to the Holocaust in Ukraine, a disturbing catalog of mass murder, and a primer on the moral implications of living in a land where genocide is perpetrated.

Note

[1]. Ray Brandon and Wendy Lower, eds., The Shoah in Ukraine: History, Testimony, Memorialization (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008).

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Citation: Kyle Jantzen. Review of Desbois, Patrick, The Holocaust by Bullets: A Priest's Journey to Uncover the Truth Behind the Murder of 1.5 Million Jews. H-German, H-Net Reviews. July, 2009.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=24952

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