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 1942-1945

by Ilya Ehrenburg (Editor), 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 comparison is to The Gulag Archipelago of Alexander Solzhenitsyn. This definitive edition, including for the first time materials omitted from previous editions, is a major addition to the literature on the Holocaust. Now available in paperback, it will be of particular interest to students, teachers, and scholars of the Holocaust and those interested in the history of Europe. The Black is the single most important text documenting the slaughter of Jews in the USSR. Until now, it was only available in English in truncated editions. Because of its profound significance, this definitive English translation of The Complete Black Book of Russian Jewry, now in paperback, is a major literary and intellectual event.

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

595 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1946

About the author

Ilya Grigoryevich Ehrenburg (Russian: Илья Григорьевич Эренбург) was a Soviet writer, journalist, translator, and cultural figure.

Ehrenburg is among the most prolific and notable authors of the Soviet Union; he published around one hundred titles. He became known first and foremost as a novelist and a journalist - in particular, as a reporter in three wars (First World War, Spanish Civil War and the Second World War). His articles on the Second World War have provoked intense controversies in West Germany, especially during the sixties.

The novel The Thaw (Оттепель) gave its name to an entire era of Soviet cultural politics, namely, the liberalization after the death of Joseph Stalin. Ehrenburg's travel writing also had great resonance, as did to an arguably greater extent his autobiography People, Years, Life, which may be his best known and most discussed work. The Black Book, edited by him and Vassily Grossman, has special historical significance; detailing the genocide on Soviet citizens of Jewish ancestry, it is the first great documentary work on the Holocaust.

In addition, Ehrenburg wrote a succession of works of poetry.

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).

[Keith · Rating 4 out of 5]

Finished THE COMPLETE BLACK BOOK OF RUSSIAN JEWRY (1946), eyewitness testimonials and documents focused primarily on the execution of over 1 million Jews in the Soviet Union during the Second World War, collected and edited by prominent Russian authors Ilya Ehrenburg (1891-1967) and Vasily Grossman (1905-1964), whose epic novel LIFE AND FATE (1960) draws upon events described in the BLACK BOOK. The book is a difficult read, seemingly page after page of the repeated ordeal of the German army taking over towns and villages, followed by the Schutzstaffel, the Nazi SS, that imposed degrading, dehumanizing rules on Jews, forced them into ghettoes, and imposed physical and psychological tortures. Able-bodied men would be separated from women and children and forced to dig trenches. The SS, called “Hitlerites,” would then systematically take hundreds of Jews at a time, strip them naked, and shoot them point-blank so they would fall into these burial pits in layers. Surviving prisoners would be forced to stack the bodies into bonfires. Another section of the book includes accounts of the annihilation camps at Treblinka and Auschwitz. There were times I found it difficult to sleep at night after reading nightmarish descriptions of such sociopathic mass-murders and stupid hatred. It was small comfort that there were no pictures (one can find plenty on the Internet). But even the Internet and written accounts of the Holocaust cannot convey the stench of filthy bodies and burning flesh, the sounds of screaming mothers and crying children, the touch and pain of bayonetted infants, frostbitten feet, pools of blood, and mangled bodies. Why subject oneself to reading such accounts?

One of my questions I have had about the Holocaust is why didn’t the people resist? The BLACK BOOK tells that many Jews did. The Hitlerites were aware of possible resistance and took measures to reduce such possibilities, such as executing young men first before there was time for organized defiance. The Hitlerites found that naked older men were more submissive and compliant. Nevertheless, Soviet Jews often resisted in subtle ways, holding onto their humanity by organizing concerts and lectures. One librarian organized a library in a ghetto and noted a dramatic increase in readership. Many escaped to join partisan fighters or to survive through the protection of sympathetic peasant families. There are stirring accounts of a revolt led by a Russian army officer, Aleksandr Pechersky, resulting in the destruction of the death camp at Sobibir, and of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. Grossman writes: “Hitlerism deprived these people of their homes and the lives; the Nazis wanted to erase the memory of their names from the world. But all of them—the mothers who shielded their children with their bodies, the little ones who wiped the tears from their fathers’ eyes, those who fought through the night with knives and grenades and fell in battle, and the naked girl who fought alone against dozens—all of them, having departed from being, have preserved forever the dearest name, one that the Hitlerites and Himmlerites could not trample into the ground: the name of the Human Being. On their memorial it shall be written: ‘Here Lies a Human Being’” (p. 474).

Again, why subject oneself to reading about the Holocaust? Grossman writes in the preface of the BLACK BOOK, “Millions of murdered innocent people, whose ashes have been buried in the earth and scattered over fields and roads, believed that the hour of reckoning would come. As they stood along the edge of a mass grave, crossed the threshold into a gas chamber, or approached a bonfire in their final moments, those who were doomed hurled curses upon their executioners and warned them of inevitable retribution. And retribution came. The triumph of justice after the terrible years of Hitler’s dominion gives us reason to look toward the future of hope and faith. May contempt for the terrible ideas of racism live eternally in the heart of humanity. May the memory of the suffering and agonizing deaths of millions of murdered women, children, and old people be preserved forever. May the holy memory of those who were tortured become the formidable guardian of good; may the ashes of those consumed in the flames find their way into the hearts of the living and call forth the brotherhood of people and nations” (p. xxxv).

To honor the memories of these Slavic Jews, that’s partly why I kept reading to the end. But also to be aware of two awful ironies of the BLACK BOOK. First, though the editors had initial hopes for the legacy of their archival efforts (foreshadowing Solzhenitsyn’s GULAG ARCHIPELIGO), “the press plates were removed from the printing plant in 1946…viewed as a danger to the Communist regime and its narrow mechanical commitment to social class.” The purveyors of Stalinism and Marxism had no great love for Jews any more than the Nazis, “with [their] mean-spirited anti-Semitism well rooted in Marx” (p. viii). Like so many other censored Communist era works, the publishing history of the BLACK BOOK followed a harrowing path, the COMPLETE version as intended by Grossman and Ehrenburg not translated into English until 2001. Second, despite Grossman’s hope that anti-Semitic racism would be held in contempt, recent history shows this toxic ideology is alive and well among Islamic terror-mongers. Perhaps more disturbing is such virulent anti-Semitism exhibited in my own country by the “from the river to the sea” mob. Dietrich Bonhoeffer considered stupidity more dangerous to human society than evil. He defined stupidity as “outsourcing our critical thinking,” “willful ignorance,” and “conformity.” Anyone who thinks the Israeli descendants of the survivors of Russian pogroms and German death camps are somehow guilty of genocide and should be destroyed, that person is criminally stupid.

[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.

[Badrakh · Rating 5 out of 5]

Yes, my interest in the book slowly vanished the deeper I went. I could have finished it by reading in a slow tempo here and there, but the will was gone. The volume is thick—an immense effort by the authors, gathering collective evidence from survivors and letters left behind by those who perished. Yet the gruesome sadism of those dark acts was unbearable. Too many lives—the elders, the children, fathers and mothers, and the babies whose brief time in this world was cut even shorter—snuffed out in moments, consumed by the hatred that fascism ignited.

[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.

[Leonardo]

Beevor cuenta en Berlin que este libro fue prohibido en Rusia.

[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.