The Complete Black Book of Russian Jewry

by Vasily Grossman

The Complete Black Book of Russian Jewry is a collection of eyewitness testimonies, letters, diaries, affidavits, and other documents on the activities of the Nazis against Jews in the camps, ghettoes, and towns of Eastern Europe. Arguably, the only apt comparism is to The Gulag Archipelago of Alexander Solzhenitsyn . This definitive edition of The Black Book , including for the first time materials omitted from previous editions, is a major addition to the literature on the Holocaust. It will be of particular interest to students, teachers, and scholars of the Holocaust and those interested in the history of Europe. By the end of 1942, 1.4 million Jews had been killed by the Einsatzgruppen that followed the German army eastward; by the end of the war, nearly two million had been murdered in Russia and Eastern Europe. Of the six million Jews who perished in the Holocaust, about one-third fell in the territories of the USSR. The single most important text documenting that slaughter is The Black Book , compiled by two renowned Russian authors Ilya Ehrenburg and Vasily Grossman. Until now, The Black Book was only available in English in truncated editions. Because of its profound significance, this new and definitive English translation of The Complete Black Book of Russian Jewry is a major literary and intellectual event. From the time of the outbreak of the war, Ehrenburg and Grossman collected the eyewitness testimonies that went into The Black Book . As early as 1943 they were planning its publication; the first edition appeared in 1944. During the years immediately after the war, Grossman assisted Ehrenburg in compiling additional materials for a second edition, which appeared in 1946 (in English as well as Russian). Since the fall of the Soviet regime, Irina Ehrenburg, the daughter of Ilya Ehrenburg, has recovered the lost portions of the manuscript sent to Yad Vashem. The texts recovered by Ms. Ehrenburg include numerous documents that had been censored from the original manuscript, as well as items that had been hidden by the Grossman family. In addition, she verified and, where appropriate, corrected the accuracy of documents that had already appeared in earlier editions of The Black Book .

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Holocaust, Russia, World War II, Jewish, World History

628 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1946

About the author

Born Iosif Solomonovich Grossman into an emancipated Jewish family, he did not receive a traditional Jewish education. A Russian nanny turned his name Yossya into Russian Vasya (a diminutive of Vasily), which was accepted by the whole family. His father had social-democratic convictions and joined the Mensheviks. Young Vasily Grossman idealistically supported the Russian Revolution of 1917.

When the Great Patriotic War broke out in 1941, Grossman's mother was trapped in Berdychiv by the invading German army, and eventually murdered together with 20,000 to 30,000 other Jews who did not evacuate Berdychiv. Grossman was exempt from military service, but volunteered for the front, where he spent more than 1,000 days. He became a war reporter for the popular Red Army newspaper Krasnaya Zvezda (Red Star). As the war raged on, he covered its major events, including the Battle of Moscow, the Battle of Stalingrad, the Battle of Kursk, and the Battle of Berlin. In addition to war journalism, his novels (such as The People are Immortal (Народ бессмертен) were being published in newspapers and he came to be regarded as a legendary war hero. The novel Stalingrad (1950), later renamed For a Just Cause (За правое дело), is based on his own experiences during the siege.

Grossman's descriptions of ethnic cleansing in Ukraine and Poland, and the liberation of the Treblinka and Majdanek extermination camps, were some of the first eyewitness accounts —as early as 1943—of what later became known as 'The Holocaust'. His article The Hell of Treblinka (1944) was disseminated at the Nuremberg War Crimes Tribunal as evidence for the prosecution.

Grossman died of stomach cancer in 1964, not knowing whether his novels would ever be read by the public.

Reviews

[Olethros · Rating 4 out of 5]

-Lo monstruoso y real nunca debe ser olvidado.-

Género. Ensayo (en realidad es una crónica que une distintos testimonios del horror que el ser humano es capaz de causar a otros).

Lo que nos cuenta. Recopilación de testimonios de personas que sufrieron, vieron y lucharon en distintas regiones de la antigua URSS durante la invasión alemana en la Segunda Guerra Mundial y que ofrecen el relato de los horrores de los que fueron testigos. La historia de la publicación del libro, listo allá por 1945 pero que no vio la luz completo por primera vez hasta 1980 (aunque distintas versiones parciales se publicaron aquí y allá, incluso fragmentos), merecería su propia obra al respecto tanto por las intencionalidades que trataron de impulsarlo como las que lo frenaron durante mucho tiempo.

¿Quiere saber más de este libro, sin spoilers? Visite:

http://librosdeolethros.blogspot.com/...

[Monique · Rating 5 out of 5]

I was only able to read the first 28 pages of this nearly 600 page book.
The Black Book is a collection of eye witness reports compiled in 1945 and 1946 by Ilya Ehrenburg and Vasily Grossman, never published in the USSR.

These reports describe the unimaginable horrors perpetrated against the Jews by the SS Einsatzgruppen who accompanied the German army during their invasion of Ukraine, Belarus, Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia, which were under Soviet rule at the time.
The sole purpose of these Einsatzgruppen was the murder of Jews.

The first eye witness reports are about the mass murders at Babi Yar on the outskirts of Kiev, Ukraine.
In September 1941, the Nazis forced about 33,000 Jews from Kiev, mostly the elderly, women and children (the men were conscripted in the Soviet army), to march at gunpoint to the ravine at Babi Yar.
They were forced to give up all their belongings, undress completely and line up at the edge of the ravine naked where they were shot in the back and thus fell into the ravine.
The shootings went on for two full days until everyone was eliminated.
A few individuals jumped into the ravine without being shot and were able to crawl from under the corpses to safety in the countryside where some good souls kept them hidden and thus they could bear witness.

(note: later, historians assessed that the number of Jews shot in Babi Yar was closer to 100,000)

I read the next chapter about the murders of the Jews of Berdichev, which occurred in a more disorderly manner but with incredible cruelty. Children's heads cut off in front of their parents, women's breasts cut off.

After that, I had to put the book down. Maybe I'll pick it up at a later time.

Most people, even those who have heard about the Holocaust, are not aware that the Nazis, before they deployed their gas chambers and industrial mass murders in concentration camps such as Auschwitz, had already manually murdered about 1.5 million Jews in the Soviet territories which they occupied in 1941.

[Walter Mendoza · Rating 4 out of 5]

The black book by Ehrenburg and Grossman, describes the hideous procedure german action, the determination of the Nazis to torture and murder every captured. The book is path a depths of depravity to which the human is capable, collection of stories submitted by survivors, like the massacres of Babi Yar, Minsk, Treblinka.

To immerse one self in the task of recording the history as Ehrenburg and Grossman, you can feel the events about the victims suffering, a must read for those interested in Holocaust history.

I recommend this book.

[Peter Edelman · Rating 5 out of 5]

Known as the Black Book written with Ilya Ehrenberg about the Holocaust in the Soviet Union. Grossman was from Berdichev, Ukraine, where my father's mother was born. Grossman's mother was murdered there by the Germans. Hundreds of years old, the Jewish community was exterminated in a few days.

[Tomasz · Rating 4 out of 5]

Dużo dziwnych decyzji edytorskich, niestety (za to bardzo się chwali zaznaczenie partii tekstu uzupełnionych po cięciach cenzury).

[XR · Rating 5 out of 5]

Extensísima recopilación de testimonios sobre el exterminio de los judíos en los territorios ocupados de la Unión Soviética. La particularidad y el interés máximo de la obra es que corresponden fundamentalmente a las fases anteriores a los campos de exterminio, es decir, se recogen sobre todo las acciones de los Einsatzgruppen, la ghettoización y las incontables acciones menores que no suelen aparecer en las grandes monografías. Una de las conclusiones posibles es que el nivel de brutalidad nazi fue muy superior en tales acciones menores que en los grandes campos de concentración y exterminio.La historia de la publicación, entorpecida por la censura stalinista, es en sí misma interesante también.

[Natxo Cruz · Rating 4 out of 5]

Estremedora recopilació de cròniques de les barbaritats comeses pels nazis contra els jueus a l'Europa de l'est entre 1941 i 1944, no només als camps de concentració, sinó arreu per allà on la infanteria deixava pas franc als sonderkommandos de les SS.
Magnífic testimoni, millorat en el sentit que l'edició del llibre permet distingir les parts dels textos censurats per l'stalinisme.
Un gran exercici de memòria que haurien de llegir especialment aquells que avui banalitzen el significat del nazisme.

[Gustavo Rivera · Rating 5 out of 5]

Lo hemos oido. Nos lo han contado. Lo hemos visto en peliculas. Pero la inmediatez del testimonio es necesaria. Leerlo y volverlo a leer. Para que no se olvide. Para que jamas nunca una cosa asi vuelva a suceder. Los crimenes sucedieron al amparo de la guerra. Pero ya mucho antes las ideologias campeaban a la libre, se discutian por seudo académicos. Nunca mas. Jamas algo asi de nuevo. Leer. Recordar. Honrar las victimas, pero sobre todo tener consciecia de que no se puede repetir

[Micebyliz]

Well, i finished this book finally. A grueling read. I took my time with this because it's not the kind of book you can read a lot of at one time like a novel. So i read other books in between sections for a breather. Also finished knitting a sweater.
Now i'm going to read some novels and try to not have nightmares.

[Julián Gómez · Rating 5 out of 5]

Censurado en la Unión Soviética debido a su contenido crítico sobre los crímenes de guerra nazis durante la Segunda Guerra Mundial y, en menor medida, por su discusión de los crímenes del régimen soviético, como el Holodomor y las purgas estalinistas, El libro negro, es una gran recopilación de testimonios y documentos que narran a detalle la crueldad de la guerra, la vida en los guetos, las condiciones de los que pisaban los campos de concentración y exterminio y en última instancia, los verdugos.

[Hairo Jorge Paitan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Los horrores nazis graficados (con algo de ideología rusa en sus párrafos) de manera tan detallada y desde múltiples voces (más allá de los editores del libro) permiten dar cuenta de la inmensidad y sistematización de los crímenes cometidos. Conforme uno avanza, el libro va perdiendo fuerza debido a que se hace repetitivo.

[William Cruz Ortiz · Rating 5 out of 5]

"Todos los crímenes temen a los testigos".

[Paolo · Rating 5 out of 5]

Un resoconto tremendo delle atrocità naziste in Unione Sovietica

[Mateo Toledo · Rating 5 out of 5]

Muy largo. Impresionante testimonio.