Black Book

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Black Book

The Black Book: The Ruthless Murder of Jews by German-Fascist Invaders Throughout the Temporarily-Occupied Regions of the Soviet Union and in the Death Camps of Poland during the War 1941–1945 alternatively The Black Book of the Holocaust, or simply The Black Book, (Chornaya Kniga; Yiddish transliteration: Dos Shvartzer Bukh) was a result of the collaborative effort by the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee

Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee

The Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee was formed in Samara, Russia in April 1942 with the official support of the Soviet authorities. It was designed to influence international public opinion and organize political and material support for the Soviet fight against Nazi Germany, particularly from the Western world....
(JAC) and members of the American Jewish community to document the anti-Jewish crimes of the Holocaust

The Holocaust

The Holocaust , also known as , Churben is the term generally used to describe the genocide of approximately six million European Jews during World War II, as part of a program of deliberate extermination planned and executed by Nazi Germany under Adolf Hitler....
and the participation of Jews in the fighting and the resistance movement

Resistance movement

A resistance movement is a group or collection of individual groups, dedicated to fighting an invader in an military occupation country or the government of a sovereign nation through either the use of physical force, or nonviolence....
against the Nazis

Nazism

Nazism, officially National Socialism , refers to the ideology and practices of the National Socialist German Workers? Party under Adolf Hitler, and the policies adopted by the dictatorial government of Nazi Germany from 1933 to 1945....
during World War II

World War II

World War II, or the Second World War , was a global military conflict which involved a Participants in World War II, including all of the great powers, organised into two opposing military alliances: the Allies of World War II and the Axis powers....
.

inent Jewish Soviet

Soviet Union

The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics was a Constitution of the Soviet Union socialist state that existed in Eurasia from 1922 to 1991.The name is a translation of the , romanization of Russian Soyuz Sovetskikh Sotsialisticheskikh Respublik, abbreviated ????, SSSR....
writers and journalists Ilya Ehrenburg

Ilya Ehrenburg

Ilya Grigoryevich Ehrenburg , – August 31, 1967 was a Soviet writer, journalist and propagandist, whose 1954 novel The Thaw gave its name to the Khrushchev Thaw....
and Vasily Grossman

Vasily Grossman

Vasily Semyonovich Grossman , December 12 1905 – September 14 1964, was a prominent Soviet-era writer and journalist....
served as war reporters for the Red Army

Red Army

The Red Army was the armed force first organized by the Bolsheviks during the Russian Civil War in 1918 and, in 1922, became the army of the Soviet Union....
.

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Encyclopedia

Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee

The Holocaust

Resistance movement

Nazism

World War II

Background

Prominent Jewish Soviet

Soviet Union

Ilya Ehrenburg

Ilya Grigoryevich Ehrenburg , – August 31, 1967 was a Soviet writer, journalist and propagandist, whose 1954 novel The Thaw gave its name to the Khrushchev Thaw....
and Vasily Grossman

Vasily Grossman

Vasily Semyonovich Grossman , December 12 1905 – September 14 1964, was a prominent Soviet-era writer and journalist....
served as war reporters for the Red Army

Red Army

The Red Army was the armed force first organized by the Bolsheviks during the Russian Civil War in 1918 and, in 1922, became the army of the Soviet Union....
. Grossman's documentary reports of the opening of the Treblinka

Treblinka extermination camp

Treblinka II was a Germany extermination camp in occupied Poland during World War II. Around 850,000 people - more than 99.5 percent of them Jews, but also other victims were killed there between July 1942 and October 1943; the camp was closed after a revolt during which a few Germans were killed and a small number of prisoners escaped....
and Majdanek

Majdanek

Majdanek was a German Nazi concentration camp on the outskirts of Lublin, Poland. The camp operated from October 1, 1941 until July 22, 1944, when it was captured nearly intact by the advancing Soviet Red Army....
extermination camps were some of the first eyewitness accounts — as early as 1943 — of what later became known as the Shoah

Shoah

Headline text Shoah is a Hebrew word meaning "disaster" or "conflagration". "The Shoa" or, with the addition of "Ha" , HaShoah is commonly used to refer to the Holocaust....
. His article The Treblinka Hell (, 1944) was disseminated at the Nuremberg Trials

Nuremberg Trials

The Nuremberg Trials were a series of trials, or tribunals, most notable for the prosecution of prominent members of the political, military, and economic leadership of Nazi Germany after its defeat in World War II....
as a document for the prosecution.

Manuscripts and publications

In 1944–1945, based on their own experiences and on other documents they collected, Ehrenburg and Grossman produced two volumes under the title Murder of the People in Yiddish and handed the manuscript to the JAC. Copies were sent to the United States

United States

The United States of America is a Federal government constitutional republic comprising U.S. state and a federal district. The country is situated mostly in central North America, where its Contiguous United States and Washington, D.C., the Capital districts and territories, lie between the Pacific Ocean and Atlantic Oceans, Borders of the U...
, Israel

Israel

Israel officially the State of Israel , is a country in the Middle East located on the eastern shore of the Mediterranean Sea. It borders Lebanon in the north, Syria in the northeast, Jordan in the east, and Egypt on the southwest, and contains geographically diverse features within its relatively small area....
(then the British mandate of Palestine) and Romania

Romania

Romania is a country located in Southeastern Europe Central Europe, North of the Balkan Peninsula, on the Lower Danube, within and outside the Carpathian Mountains, bordering on the Black Sea....
in 1946, and excerpts were published in the United States in English under the title Black Book that same year. In Romania, a part of the manuscript was also published in 1946. It was also printed in Israel. A handwritten manuscript of the Book is held at Yad Vashem

Yad Vashem

File:Yad Vashem BW 3.JPGYad Vashem is Israel's official memorial to the Jewish victims of the Holocaust established in 1953 through the Yad Vashem Law passed by the Knesset, Israel's parliament....
.

The fate of the Black Book in the USSR

According to Ehrenburg, the mandatory State literary commission did not commit to publish the Book in October 1944: "Instead of a straight answer, the resolution was: 'write the book, and if it comes out well, it would be published.' But it is not we who are the authors, it is the fascists… What does that mean, 'comes out well' this is not a novel, it is a document."

The Book was partially printed in the Soviet Union by the Yiddish publisher Der Emes, however the entire edition, the typefaces, as well as the manuscript, were destroyed. First the censors ordered changes in the text to conceal the specifically anti-Jewish character of the atrocities and to downplay the role of Ukrainians

Ukrainians

Ukrainians are an East Slavs ethnic group primarily living in Ukraine, or more broadly?citizens of Ukraine . Some 200 years ago and times prior to that, Ukrainians were usually referred to and known as Rusyny ....
who worked as Nazi police officers. Then in 1948 the Soviet edition of the book was scrapped completely. The collection of original documents that Ehrenburg handed down to the Vilnius

Vilnius

Vilnius is the largest city and the Capital of Lithuania, with a population of 555,613 as of 2008. It is the seat of the Vilnius city municipality and of the Vilnius district municipality....
Jewish Museum after the war was secretly returned to him upon the Museum's termination in 1948. The JAC was also disbanded, its members purged

Great Purge

Great Purge was a series of campaigns of political repression and persecution in the Soviet Union orchestrated by Joseph Stalin in 1936-1938. Also described as a "Soviet holocaust" by several authors, it involved the purge of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, repression of kulaks, Red Army leadership, and the persecution of unaffiliat...
at the outset of the state campaign against the "rootless cosmopolitan

Rootless cosmopolitan

Rootless cosmopolitan was a Soviet Union euphemism introduced during Joseph Stalin's antisemitic campaign of 1949–1953, which culminated in the "exposure" of the alleged Doctors' plot....
s", a Soviet euphemism for Jews. (See also the Doctors' plot

Doctors' plot

The Doctors' plot was an alleged conspiracy to eliminate the leadership of the Soviet Union by means of Jewish doctors poisoning top leadership....
). Typically, the official Soviet policy regarding the Holocaust was to present it as atrocities committed against Soviet citizens, without acknowledging the genocide

Genocide

Genocide is the deliberate and systematic destruction, in whole or in part, of an ethnic, racial, religious, or national group.While precise genocide definitions, a legal definition is found in the 1948 United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide ....
of the Jews.

A Russian-language edition of the Black Book was published in Jerusalem

Jerusalem

Jerusalem is the capital of Israel and its List of Israeli cities in both population and area, with a population of 747,600 residents over an area of if Positions on Jerusalem East Jerusalem is included....
in 1980, and finally in Kiev

Kiev

Kiev, also known as Kyiv , is the Capital and the largest city of Ukraine, located in the north central part of the country on the Dnieper River....
, Ukraine in 1991.