- Hardcover: 272 pages
- Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan; First Edition edition (August 19, 2008)
- Language: English
- Age Range: 16 years +
Summary:
In this heart-wrenching book, Father Patrick Desbois documents the daunting task of identifying and examining all the sites where Jews were exterminated by Nazi mobile units in the Ukraine in WWII. Using innovative methodology, interviews, and ballistic evidence, he has determined the location of many mass gravesites with the goal of providing proper burials for the victims of the forgotten Ukrainian Holocaust. Compiling new archival material and many eye-witness accounts, Desbois has put together the first definitive account of one of history's bloodiest chapters.
Published with the support of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. (Amazon).
My Review: This book isn't your typical non-fiction book for youth, The Holocaust by Bullets, part memoir and part chronicle, this book is meant for older youth. While not as disturbing as other works on the holocaust, Desbois chronicles his journey to document the Holocaust of Ukrainian Jews.
Father
Patrick Desbois grew up in Saint-Laurent, France. Born ten years after World
War II, Desbois’s childhood, and really the course of his whole life were
influenced by the events of the war. As a child Desbois heard stories of the
French resistance fighters, the Maquis,
that his maternal grandparents’ farm supplied fresh supplies to the resistance,
he knew where the demarcation line was, and heard of foreign places “synonymous
with misfortune and suffering...” Mauthausen—a cousin died there, Dachau—another cousin was deported to and
returned from there, and Rawa-Ruska, (Desbois, 6).
[T]here
was one name, a name unlike all the others: Rawa-Ruska.
I was told that my grandfather Claudius had been taken there during the
war. As usual, I tried to understand... Just once, he [Claudius] uttered these
words: “For us, the camp was difficult...But it was worse for the others!” That
sentence was engraved in my consciousness as a child for all time... I was 12
years old when I saw images of the Holocaust...for the first time...I saw
photographs of the concentration camps for Jews at Bergen-Belsen...Shocked by
my discovery, I didn’t tell anyone about it but since that day, I have always
sought to understand what happened, what the tragedy was that my grandfather
had been forced to witness, (Desbois, 6-10).
In
Desbois’s search for the truth, the understanding of what his grandfather
endured he was led on a quest that would eventually become a great part of his
life. In 1990, not long after the fall of the Soviet Union, while visiting
Poland, near the border of Ukraine where Rawa-Ruska was located, the
understanding for Desbois came quickly:
I
was so close to where my grandfather had been...The ground slipped from under
my feet and I said to myself “You’ve been looking for this for 50 years. You’ve
finally found it.” How could I say that when I was only 35 years old? Then I
understood in a flash that I had completed a circle. That night I was as cold
as my grandfather had been 30 years before me.
I
was suddenly and brutally conscious of the unfathomable nature of what it was
my grandfather had tried to make me grasp: his deportation, and the Holocaust...
I saw the Holocaust as a responsibility: 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...[T]hat night the irrevocable decision to search took root in
me. I had to understand, (Desbois, 15).
Eventually,
a soviet transcript was translated and given to Desbois, containing the
testimony of a forest guard, it stated what the guard, Stephan Pelip,
witnessed—the execution of 10,000 Jews, and Desbois wondered if this was what
his grandfather saw.
The first step in his quest was to
learn Hebrew, learn the history of anti-Semitism, and for two years he was
trained by Charles Favre, and became a leading mediator of the Cardinal’s
relations with Jewish leaders, later Desbois began to visit the sites of the
Shoah. Eventually Desbois began to travel in the Ukraine to villages to
document what had occurred in the villages and towns to communities’ Jewish
population.
Desbois’s ultimate goal seems to
be—and should be documenting what happened to the Jews of the Ukraine.
Desbois’s role as a Priest, I believe, made it easier (though still difficult),
for people to tell them what they witnessed when the Jews were killed. The
testimony of the Ukrainian witnesses indicates to me that they were not
complicit in the murder of the Jews—they were forced to trample bodies, pull
teeth, sort garments, and witness the horror that took place—events that still
traumatized the witnesses over 50 years later.
This book should be required reading in any high school study of the Holocaust. This book documents the plight of those who were considered less than sub-human, the Ukrainian victims never made it out of their villages, there are few ways to account for how many were murdered...but counting the bullets in the mass graves.
Books to pair with The Holocaust by Bullets for Holocaust units:
Survival in Auschwitz
Night - Elie Wiesel
Born in the town of Sighet, Transylvania, Elie Wiesel was
a teenager when he and his family were taken from their home in 1944 to the
Auschwitz concentration camp, and then to Buchenwald. [This book] is the
terrifying record of Elie Wiesel's memories of the death of his family, the
death of his own innocence, and his despair as a deeply observant Jew
confronting the absolute evil of man. (WorldCat)
Other Resources:
United States Holocaust Museum
The Shoah
The Holocaust
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