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The Holocaust by Bullets: A Priest's Journey to Uncover the Truth behind the Murder of 1.5 Million Jews. By Patrick Desbois. Translated by Catherine Spencer. (New York: Palgrave. 2008. Pp. xx, 236. $26.95 clothbound, ISBN 978-0-230-60617-3; pp. 272, $17.00 paperback, ISBN 978-0-230-61757-5.)
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 socalled '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...