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Holocaust By Bullets (2008)

by Patrick Desbois(Favorite Author)

4.2 of 5 Votes: 1

ISBN

0230614515 (ISBN13: 9780230614512)

languge

English

genre

History & Biography

publisher

Palgrave Macmillan

review 1: This book gives a vivid account of the Holocaust in Ukraine. Father Patrick Desbois interviews people who witnessed the Holocaust (obviously they were young children at the time). Also he unearths physical evidence – the spent German cartridges, the buried bodies, the lime, the clothes… One can safely say that most villages in Ukraine experienced the Holocaust in some form or other.This was not a Holocaust of imprisonment – it was a Holocaust by shooting. And not only that – the Jewish people needed to be transported, burial pits dug, the bodies placed in the pits (sometimes still alive) and then afterwards buried. The Nazis did the shooting, the Ukrainians did the aforementioned as well as housing and feeding the Nazi tormentors.As can be imagined this makes for v... moreery visceral reading – one does have to stop and gasp at the sheer brutality. Father Desbois presents a human portrait of the victims who have names and faces because their Ukrainian neighbours remember them. And these neighbours who survived are also permanently scarred – over sixty years have passed, but these atrocities happened in their community and sometimes right in front of their houses.The accounts can become repetitive at times. In general they support Daniel GoldHagen’s book on the willing executioner’s. The round-ups and the shootings were organized and initiated by the Germans. They occurred when the Germans arrived in the village. Also the findings of Father Despoils match those of the Soviet prosecutors who investigated shortly after the Germans left during the war. The findings of these prosecutors were kept hidden until the collapse of the Soviet system in 1990.
review 2: I usually finish reading a book in two or three days. This one took me several weeks because I could read only a few pages before I would start crying and would have to stop reading. The inhumanity of the Third Reich during the Final Solution is well documented. However, this book provides a different, yet equally disturbing, account of the genocide. "The Holocaust by Bullets" is about 1.5 million people who were murdered in their villages by the Reich and its supporters. Friends, neighbors, and children witnessed the mass genocide and were forced to participate by the Reich. Eyewitness testimony is included at the end of each chapter and it adds depth to the story. This book is a must read for people who want to know more about the Final Solution. less

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