THE HOLOCAUST BY BULLETS

Fully one quarter of the Holocaust’s six million victims never made it as far as the Nazi death camps, writes Father Desbois; they were simply shot and stacked in pits.

On visits to Eastern Europe, this purposeful French priest from Lyon studied Hebrew, gathered a dedicated crew and investigated specific crime scenes in Ukraine. He skillfully coaxed surviving eyewitnesses with precisely detailed questions. He heard just how the Jews were slaughtered (with Germanic efficiency) and what the horses did when they smelled blood. His team recovered countless revolver, rifle and machine-gun shells, together with bones of young and old; they took forensic photos and made recordings. Local residents were “requisitioned” to participate in the killings, they heard: men to dig, children to extract gold teeth and compress bodies in the pits, cooks to feed the hungry killers, seamstresses to patch clothing stolen from naked prey, villagers to pillage homes no longer occupied. Only a few tried to hide some of the children. Desbois’s searing report delivers the testimony of witnesses finally ready to talk after more than 60 years about the events in Ukrainian meadows, fields and town squares. Not all the Jews were shot, they reveal. Some were buried alive. The ground frequently moved for three days after the burials. All of Ukraine, it seems to him, is a burial site. (Local officials disagree.) Simple, straightforward prose describes the murderous daily exertions, banal and absolutely evil. “There is only one human race—a human race that shoots two-year old children,” the priest concludes with anguish, acknowledging that “resistance in the face of evil” is a moral obligation we all too often fail to fulfill.

An important addition to studies of the Shoah, agonizing to read and utterly necessary.