Black Book
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- For other meanings, see black book (disambiguation).
The Black Book, also known by its Russian language name, Chornaya Kniga (Черная Книга) was a result of the collaborative effort by the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee (JAC) and members of the American Jewish community to document the anti-Jewish crimes of the Holocaust and the participation of Jews in the fighting and the resistance movement against the Nazis during the World War II.
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Background
Prominent Soviet writers and journalists Ilya Ehrenburg and Vasily Grossman served as war reporters for the Red Army. Grossman's documentary reports of the opening of Treblinka and Majdanek extermination camps were some of the first eyewitness accounts - as early as 1943 - of what later became known as the Shoah. His article The Treblinka Hell (Треблинский ад (http://lib.ru/PROZA/GROSSMAN/trebl.txt), 1944) was disseminated at the Nuremberg Trials as a document for the prosecution.
Manuscripts and publications
In 1944-1945, basing on their own experiences and 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, Israel (then British mandate of Palestine) and Romania in 1946, and excerpts were published in the United States in the English-language Black Book in that 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.
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 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 who worked as Nazi police. Then in 1948 the Soviet edition of the book was scrapped completely. The collection of original documents that Ehrenburg handed down to the Vilnius 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 at the outset of the state campaign against the "rootless cosmopolitans", a Soviet euphemism for Jews. (See also the Doctors' plot).
The official Soviet policy regarding the Holocaust was to present it as atrocites against Soviet citizens, not acknowledging the genocide of the Jews. For example, after the liberation of Kiev from the Nazi occupation in 1943, the Extraordinary State Commission (Чрезвычайная Государственная Комиссия) was set out to investigate Nazi crimes and its first report was ready by Decemver 25, 1943. It contained (a preserved copy exists) the following sentence:
- "The Hitlerist bandits committed mass murder of the Jewish population. They announced that on September 29, 1941, all the Jews were required to arrive to the corner of Melnikov and Dokterev streets and bring their documents, money and valuables. The butchers marched them to Babi Yar, took away their belongings, then shot them."
The officially censored version of the text was:
- "The Hitlerist bandits brought thousands of civilians to the corner of Melnikov and Dokterev streets. The butchers marched them to Babi Yar, took away their belongings, then shot them."
A Russian-language edition of the Black Book was published in Jerusalem in 1980, and finally in Kiev, Ukraine in 1991.
References
- The Black Book (http://www.jewishgen.org/yizkor/black_book/Black_Book.html) About the ruthless murder of Jews by the Germano-Fascist aggressors in the temporarily occupied regions of the Soviet Union and in the camps of Poland during the War 1941–1945. Compiled and Edited by Vasily Grossman, Ilya Ehrenburg.
- The Black Book of Soviet Jewry (http://motlc.wiesenthal.com/text/x06/xm0617.html)