The Holocaust by Bullets

A French Catholic priest from rural Bresse, Father Patrick Desbois spent over two decades investigating the mass shooting of Jews across Ukraine during World War II, a dimension of the Holocaust largely hidden behind decades of Soviet secrecy. The Holocaust by Bullets is his account of that investigation: part memoir, part oral history, and part forensic report, tracing how his grandfather's wartime silence led him from the countryside of eastern France to the mass graves scattered across Ukraine.

Desbois opens the book in spring 2007, traveling by van through the rural Volhynia region of western Ukraine, where painted houses and horse-drawn carts remind him of his own childhood. In the village of Senkivishvka, his team locates two elderly sisters, Luba and Vira, who as children watched a German policeman named Humpel shoot every Jew in the village in the back of the neck as they lay face down in a ditch, pausing between rounds for liquor. These sisters are Desbois's 460th witnesses to the murder of Jews in Ukraine.

Desbois then turns to his childhood in Chalon-sur-Saône, France, where his family ran a cheese and poultry shop and instilled in him an ethic of justice. The landscape of his youth bore the marks of World War II: The line of demarcation, the border dividing France into occupied and unoccupied zones, passed near his grandfather Claudius's home, and family conversations identified which houses the Germans had burned. Several relatives were affected by Nazi camps, but one name provoked a deeper silence: Rawa-Ruska, where Claudius had been deported. At age seven, Desbois pushed his grandfather to speak. Claudius recounted three escape attempts, then fell silent, saying only that the camp was difficult but "for the others, it was worse." At 12, Desbois discovered photographs of Bergen-Belsen in the municipal library and realized that "the others" were Jews, a discovery that drove his lifelong quest.

Desbois traces his path to the priesthood, from a sudden religious conversion in 1976 through ordination at the Prado seminary in Lyon. A trip to Poland in December 1990 proved decisive: Learning he was near the Ukrainian border and Rawa-Ruska, he resolved to investigate the Holocaust. He began studying Hebrew and attended seminars at Yad Vashem, Israel's national Holocaust memorial, for seven years.

At the Belzec extermination camp in Poland, a 91-year-old village priest described watching executions from his rooftop. The baker, the carpenter, and the mayor's daughter who served the camp all spoke freely, revealing that the camps had not been hidden from view. Crossing into Ukraine, Desbois found the memorial of Camp 325 at Rawa-Ruska, where his grandfather had been interned, and met Chokhina, the last Jew of Rawa-Ruska. He discovered that while a nearby German military cemetery reburied every soldier individually, Jewish mass graves remained unmarked.

The investigation expanded when Deputy Mayor Yaroslav took Desbois to the hamlet of Borove, where roughly 100 elderly villagers led him to a forest clearing containing the mass grave of the last 1,200 Jews of Rawa-Ruska. One by one, the villagers recounted what they had seen: blood running like a stream, grenades thrown into the pit to kill the wounded. Desbois realized the memory of the genocide was carried by humble country people who had never been asked to speak. Yaroslav challenged him to extend the work to a hundred villages, and Desbois agreed.

He assembled a research team including Svetlana Biryulova, a Russian-born art historian who served as interpreter, and Mikhailo "Micha" Strutinsky, a ballistics expert from Lviv who located mass graves. A crucial breakthrough came when Micha used metal detectors to uncover hundreds of German cartridges at execution sites. Each cartridge corresponded to one victim, since the Germans typically used a single bullet per person, and five-round clips for Mauser rifles explained why victims were brought forward in groups of five.

Desbois reflects on the difficulty of accepting what he uncovered. He initially believed all mass graves were hidden in forests, but witnesses repeatedly led him to graves at the center of villages; the Nazis feared forests because they harbored partisan fighters. Witnesses consistently described the earth above the pits "moving" for three days, meaning many victims had been buried alive. The witnesses fell into three categories: indirect witnesses who heard about the killings, direct witnesses who observed from nearby, and requisitioned witnesses, mostly children forced at gunpoint to dig pits, transport Jews, or pack down bodies. In Ternivka, a witness named Petrivna described being one of three barefoot girls ordered to trample the bodies of shot Jews and spread sand between rounds of shooting. In Romanivka, Hanna Senikova described her aunt cooking a banquet for the Germans during the executions, with shooters rotating between eating and killing.

Desbois professionalized his methodology after presenting findings at major institutions, including the Claims Conference in New York and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. German historian Dieter Pohl confirmed that requisitioned witnesses appeared in no German records. The team developed a protocol: archival research before each trip, followed by field interviews using concrete objects and sensory details as memory triggers.

Desbois also explains Operation 1005, a Nazi plan launched in 1942 under SS officer Paul Blobel, who had previously commanded the massacre at Babi Yar. Commandos followed the routes of the Einsatzgruppen, the mobile killing squads, exhuming and cremating bodies on specially designed pyres to destroy evidence. In Voskresenskoye, a witness named Maria described Soviet prisoners chained together and forced to cremate bodies; when the work was finished, the Germans locked the prisoners in a building and set it ablaze.

The book's most comprehensive case study is the three-year investigation of Busk, near Lviv. Witness Anna Dychkant led the team to the Jewish cemetery where mass executions had occurred, recounting how Jews threw their jewelry into the river in defiance before being shot. Soviet archives from 1944 confirmed the oral testimony. In August 2006, a three-week archaeological excavation conducted in accordance with Jewish law revealed 17 mass graves containing approximately 1,750 victims. On September 1, 2006, Rabbi Bohl of the Belz yeshiva arrived to recite the kaddish, the Jewish prayer for the dead, over the graves for the first time since 1943.

Desbois catalogs the Nazis' varied killing methods, which extended across all of Ukraine, from Galicia to Crimea. In Strusiv, soldiers ordered Christians to mark their doors with crosses, then shot every Jewish inhabitant in unmarked houses, a perversion of the biblical Passover narrative. In Sataniv, the entire Jewish community was walled up alive in cellars beneath the marketplace. Desbois also recounts Ukrainians who risked their lives to rescue Jews, including a woman named Raissa whose grandmother snatched her as a toddler from the line at Babi Yar, was struck and shot at, and hid with her in the Jewish cemetery until nightfall.

The Krymchaks are a Jewish ethnic group from the Crimean Peninsula. The book closes with the story of Dora, a four-and-a-half-year-old Krymchak girl from Simferopol who was taken to an execution site where, naked in the cold, she begged the Germans to return her coat before being shot. Decades later, Dora's half-sister gives Desbois the child's dress and asks him to place it in a museum. On September 5, 2007, Desbois receives a fax containing a Soviet archival testimony: A forest guard near Rawa-Ruska witnessed the execution of Jews in December 1942 at a pit dug by French prisoners of war from his grandfather Claudius's Camp 325. The book ends with Desbois unable to look away, haunted by the question of whether his grandfather witnessed or helped dig that pit.