{"id":21237,"date":"2023-01-09T14:52:11","date_gmt":"2023-01-09T13:52:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.historyextra.com\/?p=222530"},"modified":"2023-01-09T16:36:47","modified_gmt":"2023-01-09T15:36:47","slug":"the-black-book-of-soviet-jewry","status":"publish","type":"rss_feed","link":"https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/bbchistory\/rss_feed\/the-black-book-of-soviet-jewry\/","title":{"rendered":"The Black Book of Soviet Jewry"},"content":{"rendered":"

<\/p>

By Jonny Wilkes\n \t\t<\/p>

Published: Monday, 09 January 2023 at 12:00 am<\/p>

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What is the Black Book of Soviet Jewry?<\/h2>\n

Also known as The Complete Black Book of Russian Jewry<\/em>, or simply the Black Book<\/em>, it is a powerful document of the anti-Jewish atrocities perpetrated by the Nazis in eastern Europe, as well as the activities of Jewish members of resistance movements in occupied territories during World War II<\/a>.<\/p>\n

By 1944, hundreds of survivor testimonies, accounts from victims\u2019 families, letters, diaries and other materials had been compiled by a team of journalists, led by Ilya Ehrenburg and Vasily Grossman, to fill the 500-page book. Now regarded as a landmark work on the Holocaust<\/a>, the Black Book<\/em> had a patchwork publication history for a number of decades.<\/p>\n

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Ilja Ehrenburg\u2019s portrait from 1929 (Photo by ullstein bild via Getty Images)<\/span><\/figcaption><\/div>\n

How did the project begin?<\/h2>\n

As early as 1942, the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee (JAC) in the Soviet Union<\/a> expressed a wish to collect and publish evidence of Nazi anti-Semitism. Of the 6 million who ultimately perished in the Holocaust, a third were in eastern Europe; stories of brutal treatment and mass killings were rampant. After the war shifted in favour of the Allies in 1943, plans for such a publication got underway, with Ehrenburg and Grossman appointed as editors.<\/p>\n

Who were Ilya Ehrenburg and Vasily Grossman?<\/h2>\n

Both born to Jewish families in Soviet Ukraine<\/a> and both prominent war correspondents, the two men were dogged in the compiling of material for the Black Book. Ehrenburg, a former Bolshevik as a teenager, had been a journalist in World War I<\/a>, and witnessed the Russian Revolution<\/a>, civil war and anti-Semitic pogroms. Having spent years in western Europe, he returned to the Soviet Union after World War II broke out and became a prolific and much-admired newspaper reporter.<\/p>\n

\"""\"<\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/picture><\/div>
Vasily Grossman with the Red Army in Schwerin, Germany, 1945. (Photo by Alamy)<\/span><\/figcaption><\/div>\n

Grossman had initially trained as a chemical engineer, but turned to writing in the 1930s. He became a frontline journalist for the newspaper Red Star<\/em>, covering the battles of Moscow, Stalingrad, Kursk and, eventually, Berlin, and became one of the very first reporters to write about Nazi concentration camps. Of Treblinka, he would describe how \u201cthe earth ejects crushed bones, teeth, bits of paper and clothing; it refuses to keep its awful secret. These things emerge from the unhealed wounds in the earth.\u201d<\/p>\n

What is in the Black Book?<\/h2>\n

Across its 500 pages, eyewitness accounts, affidavits and letters document the atrocities of the Holocaust, or Shoah (Hebrew for \u2018catastrophe\u2019). These range from the brutal conditions in the ghettoes into which Jews were forced, to the mass killings and death camps seen all over the occupied territories. \u201cExecutions were carried out in identical fashion in places separated from each other by hundreds and even thousands of kilometres,\u201d writes Grossman. \u201cSuch total uniformity is evidence of secret instructions worked out in advance.\u201d<\/p>\n