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.
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 readIn the early chapters of the book, most of the atten- ers may find this autobiographical beginning to be a distion falls on Desbois and his journey toward the study of traction, while others will find it helps them understand
the Holocaust, beginning with his childhood in France.
the zeal behind the French priest’s efforts. At the very
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least, it constitutes a proper admission that an author’s
own experiences and presuppositions shape the work he
or she engages in.
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
Desbois’s search for Rawa-Ruska and his journeys to of Einsatzgruppen, to store shovels and other implements
other Ukrainian mass murder sites led to a series of dis- used in the killing process, and to gather, sort, and mend
coveries he describes in narrative form. He soon found,
clothing and other possessions left behind by Jews and
for instance, that many sites where Nazis had extermireused or sold by the Germans. As Desbois discovered,
nated large groups of Jews were officially invisible, with most villagers were commanded to perform such duties
no markers or memorials. Near Lviv, for instance, at least at gunpoint. Even more significantly, he asserts repeat90,000 Jews were killed in the Lisinitchi Forest, yet no edly that “most of them were children” (pp. 66, 75, 81, 84,
public sign marks that event today (p. 111). At other lo- and 97).
cations, where memorials commemorating the massacres
had been erected, they were often placed some distance
In a great many cases, the mass murder of Jews took
away from the actual killing sites. One important break- place right in Ukrainian villages, especially when partithrough for Desbois and his team was the realization san operations made the forests unsafe for the Germans.
that killing sites could be discovered by means of metal In one village, a man led Desbois to the edge of a wide
detectors–a high concentration of spent cartridges (Ger- lawn, declaring the ground nearby to be the local exeman ones were labelled by year and place of manufac- cution site and adding that he had watched the killings
ture) meant that they had found the precise location of from twenty meters away. At that point in the conversaa mass grave. Desbois also periodically encountered ob- tion, other villagers came running up to Desbois, aware
structionism from Ukrainian peasants who did not want of the subject of the conversation. One interrupted, exto acknowledge the massacres. When he persisted in ask- claiming, “My vegetable allotment patch. That’s my veging the villagers or produced archival evidence demon- etable patch! Leave our gardens alone” (p. 65). As Desstrating that massacres had taken place, however, the sto- bois observed, “Without realizing it, with their protestaries came tumbling out.
tions they were only confirming what everyone in the
area knew: the bodies of shot Jews were resting under
What he learned from elderly Ukrainians reveals not
the tomato plants” (p. 65). During those killing operonly the depravity of the Einsatzgruppen, Order Police, ations, any enclosed space could become a temporary
and Wehrmacht units engaged in the killing, but also the prison, one of the “antechambers to death” (p. 98). Sideep trauma suffered by Ukrainians forced to watch their los, granaries, wells, ditches, schools, town halls, synJewish neighbors, business associates, schoolmates, and agogues, wine cellars, police stations, shops, pigsties,
friends being murdered or (worse still) compelled to aschicken coops, and stables were all employed either as
sist the killers in their task. For the most part, Desbois
holding cages or killing sites. In other cases, Jews were
concludes that the callous readiness of the Nazis to kill shot in the streets right outside the homes of villagers–
when faced with any opposition, no matter how slight, homes in which many of those witnesses have lived ever
created a terror that cowed most villagers into silence or since, silently carrying the trauma of those experiences
cooperation–few dared to attempt to rescue the Jews liv- throughout their lives. The most graphic example of
ing in their midst. Indeed, Desbois’s interviews reveal
this trauma was the assertion, made over and over by
just how common it was for the German forces to conthe Ukrainians Desbois interviewed, that the killing sites
script Ukrainians to assist in the task of mass murder. In “breathed” for three days, as the ground moved over the
perhaps the most disturbing section of the book, Desbois bodies of those who were only wounded, but gradually
catalogs the various forms of Ukrainian engagement in died of weakness, suffocation, or injury (p. 65).
the Holocaust. Civilians were ordered to dig burial pits,
Time and again, Desbois’s interviews with Ukrainian
to cart Jews to execution sites, or to carry the bodies of
Jews from killing sites to mass graves. Other Ukraini- villagers reveal the excessive cruelty of Germans and
ans were made to stand guard over Jews who were about (though less so) of Ukrainians. In one especially grueto be killed, to pull out the Jews’ gold teeth just before some incident, Germans trapped Jews in the cellar under
execution, or to walk back and forth across the bodies the marketplace in the village of Sataniv, walling them in
of dead and wounded Jews so as to compact the piles of to die there. For four days, the villagers had to wait until
corpses. Still others were recruited to supply sand and the ground stopped moving and silence returned to the
lime to killing sites, to shovel it over the dead and dying market. In another village called Strusiv, the Nazis or2
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ganized 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.
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
Several times, Father Desbois explains his motivation work fits into the current research on this mobile phase
for the difficult task of documenting the Holocaust in of the Holocaust. Teachers will want to use this book as
Ukraine. Certainly, the problem of evil has been in the a supplement to (though not a replacement for) convenforefront of his mind: “I am convinced that there is only tional Holocaust texts or other new works.[1] That said,
one human race–a human race that shoots two-year-old Desbois’s book serves as a moving introduction to the
children. For better or worse I belong to that human race Holocaust in Ukraine, a disturbing catalog of mass murand this allows me to acknowledge that an ideology can der, and a primer on the moral implications of living in a
deceive minds to the point of annihilating all ethical re- land where genocide is perpetrated.
flexes and all recognition of the human in the other” (p.
Note
67). For Desbois, it is not enough simply to affirm or
to declare truth. Rather, people must be committed to
[1]. Ray Brandon and Wendy Lower, eds., The Shoah
developing a “deep conscience,” because “conscience is in Ukraine: History, Testimony, Memorialization (Blooma fragile entity” (p. 68). Moreover, he sees his work as ington: 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
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoncommercialNo Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.
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