The Holocaust by Bullets: A Priest’s Journey to Uncover the Truth behind the Murder of 1.5 Million Jews (review)

Father Patrick Desbois, priest of the Archdiocese of Lyon, has produced a profound work examining the “Shoah by bullets” in Ukraine. Desbois is secretary of relations with Judaism for the French Conference of Bishops and president of Yahad-In-Unum, an organization that promotes understanding and cooperation between Catholics and Jews. In his narrative, Desbois describes the journey that led him to the Ukraine tundra to uncover archaeological evidence and eyewitness testimony of the Nazis’ mass murder of 1.5 million Jews there. This mass murder involved “no gas chambers, no automation, no so-called ‘mechanization,’” just “a man assassinating another man” (p. 55).

Born in 1955, Desbois grew up in a milieu in which memories of World War II and the Holocaust still haunted his family. His cousin who resided with his family suffered tuberculosis, a disease he caught while in Dachau. Similarly, his paternal grandfather, Claudius, had been imprisoned in Rawa-Ruska, Stalag camp 325, located in western Ukraine. After ordination, while standing only miles from the site of Stalag Rawa-Ruska during a visit to eastern Poland, Desbois recalled his grandfather’s memories: “That day I understood how much the Holocaust was part of my life. The unspeakable crime to which my grandfather had been a helpless witness—the murder of men, women, and children simply because they were Jews . . . the irrevocable decision to search took root in me. I had to understand” (p. 15). Desbois returned home and began to study the Holocaust intensely.

Eventually, Desbois visited Rawa-Ruska in search of his grandfather’s memories. There he attempted to interview locals but these encounters were not always successful. Often told that “the camps, the ghettos, the synagogues, and the stones of the Jewish cemeteries had disappeared,” Desbois attests that he “always found them” (p. 28). Desbois was never deterred in his quest to uncover the past. Rather, his findings such as the private German cemetery that he came upon in the district of Potelych confirmed the need for Desbois’s research. Expansive and precisely manicured, the cemetery contained the remains of thousands of German soldiers, including SS members, who had been reburied there and identified by name. This cemetery stood in stark contrast to the “mass graves of thousands of Jews who were shot” and whose remains were no longer identifiable (p. 34).

In an attempt to trace the mass graves of murdered Jews, Desbois assembled around himself a team of dedicated individuals. Among these were Mikhailo “Micha” Strutinsky, who schooled Desbois in ballistics in an effort to find and document the thousands upon thousands of spent cartridges, and Andrej Umansky, a researcher who helped the team prepare for each subsequent trip by scouring through German archives for testimonies of German policeman who participated in the executions and by reading the findings of the 1944 Soviet commissions that originally investigated the Nazi crimes against Jews.

For Desbois, discovering the truth was not an easy task, but one he felt compelled to fulfill. To date, he has conducted more than 400 interviews with Ukrainians. Desbois attests that local Orthodox and Catholic clergy willingly assisted him, encouraging their parishioners to recount their testimonies. Desbois admits that he had to force himself “not to judge the person who was speaking to me” (p. 67). But, at times, this was extremely difficult. For example, while interviewing Ukrainians who had witnessed the 1942 walling up and suffocating of Jews in the marketplace cellar in the town of Sataniv, Desbois had to turn off the camera and stop the interview when the informant confessed that no one had opened the cellar door until 1954.

Desbois believes that by interviewing an “outsider” who witnessed the Germans’ murder...