The Black Book of Soviet Jewry

How did the project begin?

As early as 1942, the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee (JAC) in the Soviet Union 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.

Who were Ilya Ehrenburg and Vasily Grossman?

Both born to Jewish families in Soviet Ukraine 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, and witnessed the Russian Revolution, 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.

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, 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 “the 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.”

What is in the Black Book?

Across its 500 pages, eyewitness accounts, affidavits and letters document the atrocities of the Holocaust, or Shoah (Hebrew for ‘catastrophe’). 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. “Executions were carried out in identical fashion in places separated from each other by hundreds and even thousands of kilometres,” writes Grossman. “Such total uniformity is evidence of secret instructions worked out in advance.”

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The experiences related in the Black Book are copious and horrific; some short and some long. The murder of Lyubov Mikhailovna Langman is one example. A gynaecologist from Belarus, she was being hidden with her 11-year-old daughter, but when she went to the aid of a woman having difficulty in childbirth she was betrayed to the Nazis. At first, Langman begged for her child to be spared, then “she clasped her daughter to herself and said: ‘Shoot! I don’t want her to live with you.’”

Then there is Pyotr Chepurenko’s witnessing of the Piryatin Massacre of 1,600 Jews in April 1942, when he was forced by the Nazis to fill in the mass graves. “Screams and groans were coming from the pits. Suddenly I saw my neighbour, Ruderman, rise from under the soil,” he says. “His eyes were bloody, and he was screaming: ‘Finish me off!’”

Page after page, story after story, the Black Book presents each account as a commemoration of the dead and as evidence against the Nazi regime.

When was the Black Book first published?

Initially, Ehrenburg published some of the testimonies as a monograph, titled Murder of the People, before Yiddish publisher Der Emes printed the book, but only in partial form and after censorship. There were those who actually denounced the idea of the Black Book as anti-Soviet – claiming that by focusing on the suffering of the Jews, it undermined the hardships and tragedies that befell the population as a whole.

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Such a view was founded in the Soviet Union’s own entrenched anti-Semitism, which eventually led to publication of the Black Book being banned. The first edition was even destroyed, along with the typefaces and manuscript.

How has the Black Book survived?

Copies were sent to other countries and, in 1946, the United States, Romania and British-ruled Palestine (soon to be Israel) published their own edited versions. Certain documents and accounts were omitted in each one, however. Over the decades, further material was sent out of the Soviet Union, eventually leading to a truncated Russian-language edition, published in Jerusalem in 1980. It wouldn’t be until the 1990s that the Russians had access to a full version of the Black Book. That, it turned out, would be proofed by Ehrenburg’s daughter, Irina.

“The Black Book should become a memorial placed over the innumerable graves of Soviet people viciously murdered by the German Fascists,” reads a note from the editors of the 1991 edition. It is also, it goes on, “intended to serve as material for the prosecution of the Fascist villains who organised and participated in the murder of millions of old men, women, and children.”

This article was first published in the November 2022 issue of BBC History Revealed