Synopsis of the book "Holocaust by Bullets"

[Rachel Ann Gray]

“The Holocaust by Bullets” by Father Patrick Desbois (2008)

I recommend this book.

Father Desbois traveled through isolated regions of the Ukraine, Belarus, Russia, and other republics of the USSR to listen to and pray with elderly farmers, villagers and peasants. These witnesses unburdened their souls when telling their memories of what they saw and did when the nazis and their collaborators arrived. Father Desbois and his assistants also went through archival repositories the former Soviet republics recently opened. The documents found in these collections served to bolster witnesses’ claims and corroborated physical evidence. 

I kept a list of each mention of Romanies; these are the places that interviewees claimed have mass graves. (The names are spelled just as they are in the book): 

• Zaporijie region near the Azov Sea; 
• the town of Bogdanovskoie in what was Transnitsia; 
• Kertch in the Crimea near the Azov Sea; 
• Ternivka; 
• the village of Voskesenskaye near Nikolayev; and, 
• Lubomil, near the Polish border. 

Germans murdered over 1.5 million people because they were simply born for being Jews and Romanies, and the slaughter was unaffiliated with the murder machinery of western Europe. Murders in Eastern Europe - the Ukraine and its outlying areas - were committed for the same reasons as in the west, but by different means in these remote places. Many killing sites I had never heard about. More Jews were murdered at Bogdanivka, for example, than at Babi Yar; I had never heard of the former.

Three features of Father Desbois’ interviews stood out for me: the face-to-face killings, the personal memories of the murdered as friends and neighbors, and the economy of the murders that limited one bullet per victim. First of all, the nazis shot people ‘face to face’ or more often, when the victim’s back was turned. A personal aside here, what lower form of cowardice is there? (Speaking as an American, to shoot another in the back is so detestable that it is taboo). Second, Germans shot down Jewish and Romani families in their own home towns, one another’s neighbors, friends, and schoolmates. Third, the nazis did not use more than one bullet per person: “A bullet, a Jew, a cartridge (P. 53).” Father Desbois collected and catalagued thousands of bullets and cartridges to prove the locations of murder sites. 

Nearly all of Desbois’ interviewees had been children during during WW2; the Germans “requisitioned” them at gunpoint and took them from their families for a week or more. Impoverished and barefoot, children ages eight and nine worked as “pressers,” packing down the corpses in pits to make more room. They spread lime and ash to soak up blood running out of the pits. These now-grown witnesses often mentioned how their mothers refused to take what had once belonged to the victims: “My mother said the Jews’ clothes are covered in tears.” “We were so poor and my mother told us we may be poor but I do not want blood in my house. So we took nothing because of our mother.” 

The writing style is geared towards lay readers, which I find refreshingly human. Academic Holocaust scholarship distances the researcher from the material, as is the tradition (my own Holocaust research writing is detached, cold - emotional protection, perhaps). Father Desbois respects the people he interviews, the reader's intelligence ('dumbing down' is avoided), and the need for distance between the deeply tragic and the popular trend to exploit extremes of suffering. 

If you read it, please let me know what your thoughts are.

Thank you,

Rachel

NOTE: I refuse to capitalize the letter ‘n’ when I write the word ‘nazi’, and I capitalize the ‘G’ in German. The first one is defined by membership choice, and the other is an ethnicity defined by geography.