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The Holocaust Summary

Decent Essays

In the Holocaust by Bullets Father Patrick Desbois recounts the tale of the mission he gave himself to discover and inspect all the mass burial sites of a million Jews exterminated by Nazi Mobile Units in Ukraine amid World War II. He started by wanting to travel to the burial site in Rawa Ruska where his grandfather Claudius had been taken during world war II. He finally got the chance to visit Rawa Ruska in the mid-90s.On another visit he asked the mayor where the Jews from the work camp were buried and the mayor said he didn’t know and he changed the subject. A year later there was a new memorial put up and at the celebration Desbois asked a violin player if he knew where the mass grave for the Jews from the work camp was and he knew and …show more content…

He went village by village and even door to door. He talked with individuals that had never been asked what they saw during that time. He gives another perspective of the complex manipulation of the local people by the Nazis. They made people of all ages help with the killings. In several villages, more than 60 years after these gruesome events took place the people in these villages, mainly people who were peasant children at the time came forward to tell what they witnessed during the mass killings. Most of the stories are written from the perspective of victims, families of victims, or exterminators. “They dug a large pit in the morning and in the evening a big truck arrived with Jews and Germans with rifles. And the shootings began. They killed them, and then covered up the pit.” (Desbois, 68) This was said in an interview by Olena S who didn’t want to speak in front of the other villagers. You can tell from most of the interviews in the book that the emotional trauma from being forced to be involved in the mass executions and or witnessing them has not faded after 60 years. The comment that stood out to me the most in some of the interviews said, “The ground moved for three days.”. This is because many were buried alive. Later Father Desbois added an ammunition expert to help him find graves sites by looking at spent bullet casings. By counting the …show more content…

This book relates to the course because it is an example of the general indifference that was felt towards the life of others in the Western Civilization from ancient times to the mid-17th century. Another example of how this book is related to this course is the acceptance of state-sponsored violence which was seen during World War II in the Holocaust and it was also seen in Wars or Reformation. The final example is cruelty in general, because a lot of cruel dark things took place in both the Holocaust and the Western Civilization from ancient times to the mid-17th

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