Moving book tells troubling tale of mass shootings of Jews in Ukraine
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Reviewed by Eugene J. Fisher
Catholic News Service
“The Holocaust by Bullets” is one of the most moving, troubling and insightful books on the Holocaust, or for that matter any other subject, that I have ever read.
Father Patrick Desbois is a French priest of humble background who is an adviser to the French bishops and to the Holy See for Catholic-Jewish relations. His interest in the dialogue with Jews and in the Holocaust was sparked by his grandfather, who had been a prisoner of war during World War II interned by the Germans in Ukraine and who, in telling the story of his own sufferings to his grandson, insisted that it was much worse for “the others.”
“The others,” it turned out, were the Jews, who, relatively early in the war in German-occupied Ukraine, were murdered, not by the anonymous millions in concentration camps away from the eyes of the public, but by the scores in town squares and fields in front of their horrified non-Jewish neighbors, friends who were often forced to facilitate the massacres by digging the ditches and covering over the mass graves that to this day dot the landscape of an entire country.
Until Father Desbois and his courageous team spent much of the past decade traveling around the country from village to village, interviewing the townsfolk, most of whom were children at the time of the killings, the graves were unmarked, destined it would seem for oblivion. Now the sites are carefully plotted, their positions marked exactly by GPS, with the approximate number of the victims interred there and with eyewitness stories recorded and cross-referenced with archival materials from German and Soviet records.
The book is written simply in the first person, narrating how the author became interested in and then, in the best moral sense, obsessed by his mission. It details the development by his small team of a methodology to interview witnesses and, by analyzing the number of bullets found in a given area, computing the approximate number of victims buried where they had fallen.
Some of the passages, in their stark simplicity, sear the soul of the reader. Visiting a neat, well-kept German cemetery in Lublin, Poland, for example, shortly after visiting a Jewish grave site in which they saw “nothing that resembled a cemetery,” Father Desbois comments:
“While the mass graves of the thousands of Jews who were shot are untraceable, every German killed during the war has been reburied and identified by name. The cemeteries are on the scale of the Reich. Magnificent cemeteries for the Germans ... absolutely nothing for the Jews. Thus, under the ground, everything is still in order according to the hierarchy of the Reich. We cannot give a posthumous victory to Nazism. We cannot leave the Jews buried like animals. We cannot accept this state of affairs and allow our continent to be built upon the obliterated memory of the victims of the Reich.”
This is not to say that the book is a sad one. Rather, it radiates a sense of redemption.
In interviewing the witnesses to the mass shootings of Jews in their villages, Father Desbois allows them, most for the first time since they witnessed the horrors in which they took part, to speak of what happened, to have it recorded for posterity. Many were conscripted into digging the pits into which the Jews were herded and shot. Then they were forced to cover over the pits, throwing thin layers of earth over multiple layers of the dead bodies of the conscripts’ neighbors and friends.
In the interviews, the witnesses had to relive the horror, but in telling it, they were finally freed from some of its heavy burden.
One elderly woman, for example, confessed that she and two friends were forced “to walk on the bodies of the people who were shot after every volley of shots. We were three Ukrainian girls who, in our bare feet, had to pack down the bodies of the Jews and throw a fine layer of sand on top of them so that other Jews could lay down (to be shot in turn).”
The volume is graced with 16 pages of excellent photographs of the sites, the digging and, above all, the faces of the witnesses, as well as several transcripts of testimonies. One finishes this book with new understandings of familiar words such as evil, shame, hope and grace.
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