Decades After Its Death, a Book Detailing Massacre of Jews is Reborn

After Jews were massacred by Nazis on Soviet territory during World War II, Soviet Jewish writers Ilya Ehrenburg and Vasily Grossman sought to chronicle the heinous deeds in the appropriately named “Black Book.”

The Soviets, in turn, refused to allow the book’s publication. That was in 1947.

But books, unlike people, can sometimes be reborn. A new, unabridged edition of the “Black Book,” created from page proofs discovered in the KGB archives, is now being produced by a Jewish publishing house in Lithuania, with support from Russian and American Jewish organizations.

The book was officially presented Sept. 8 at a gathering in the former Moscow meeting hall of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee, a group of Jewish intellectuals and public figures, including Ehrenburg, created by the Soviet government during World War II to mobilize world Jewish support for the Soviet war effort.

Committee leaders, Ehrenburg not among them, were tried secretly in 1952 on trumped-up charges of trying to separate the Crimea from the Soviet Union, and all but one of them were executed on orders of Josef Stalin.

Speaking about the current production of the book, Isaac Zibuc of the YAD publishing house said 18,000 copies of “Black Book” are being printed in Russian, and he hopes the book will eventually be translated into English.

Running more than 400 pages, it includes testimonies of witnesses and photographs of Nazi atrocities throughout Russia, Ukraine, Belarus and Latvia.

“This book is a sort of concentration of evil,” said Michael Heftman, who was involved in its publication. “The memories of those who were victims of fascism call us to action, based on understanding.”

Other speakers included relatives of the book’s original editors, Grossman and Ehrenburg, as well as Holocaust survivors and righteous gentiles who saved them.

The gathering was organized by Moscow’s Holocaust Center, the YAD Publishing House, the State Archives of the Russian Federation and the Moscow bureau of the Union of Councils for Soviet Jews. Sponsors of the book include the Center for Jewish Renewal, Bay Area Council for Soviet Jews, Chicago Action for Soviet Jews, the Koret Foundation, the Masada Fund and the Union of Councils for Soviet Jews.