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The Unknown Black Book: The Holocaust in the German-Occupied Soviet Territories »

Authors: Joshua Rubenstein (Editor), Ilya Altman (Editor), Christopher Morris
ISBN-13: 9780253222671, ISBN-10: 0253222672
Format: Paperback
Publisher: Indiana University Press
Date Published: August 2010
Edition: (Non-applicable)

Author Biography: Joshua Rubenstein

Joshua Rubenstein is Northeast Regional Director of Amnesty International USA. He is author of Tangled Loyalties: The Life and Times of Ilya Ehrenburg, and co-editor (with Vladimir Naumov) of Stalin's Secret Pogrom: The Postwar Inquisition of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee. He lives in Brookline, Massachusetts.

Ilya Altman is Director of the Center for Holocaust Research and Education in Moscow. He lives in Moscow, Russia.

Yitzhak Arad is former Director of Yad Vashem. His publications include Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka: The Operation Reinhard Death Camps (IUP, 1987), Ghetto in Flames: The Struggle and Destruction of the Jews in Vilna in the Holocaust. He lives in Ramat Hasharon, Israel.

Published in association with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

Book Synopsis

Powerful testimonies by survivors of the Final Solution in Nazi-occupied areas of the USSR

"And in the sky, the moon wept / Looking on with pity / Bathing passers-by / With loving radiance. / Here they crammed us in / Like herring into a barrel / Barely, barely did we find shelter / We sat in one corner. / Night fell, outlining / Golden stars /And covered with darkness / Human suffering." —from a poem by Lev Rozhetsky, Odessa schoolboy, August 1944

The Unknown Black Book provides, for the first time in English, a revelatory compilation of testimonies from Jews who survived open-air massacres and other atrocities carried out by the Germans and their allies in the occupied Soviet territories during World War II. These documents, from residents of cities, small towns, and rural areas, are first-hand accounts by survivors of work camps, ghettos, forced marches, beatings, starvation, and disease. Collected under the direction of two renowned Soviet Jewish journalists, Vasily Grossman and Ilya Ehrenburg, they tell of Jews who lived in pits, walled-off corners of apartments, attics, and basement dugouts, unable to emerge due to fear that their neighbors would betray them, which often occurred.

Preface     vii
Acknowledgments     ix
The Destruction of the Jews in German-Occupied Territories of the Soviet Union   Yitzhak Arab     xiii
The History and Fate of The Black Book and The Unknown Black Book   Ilya Altman     xix
Note on Translation     xl
The War and the Final Solution on the Russian Front   Joshua Rubenstein     3
Ukraine     51
Belorussia     233
Lithuania     277
Latvia     316
Estonia     331
The Crimea     337
Russia     383
Prisoners of War     406
Detailed Table of Contents     421
Index     427