Book Documenting Nazi Slaughter of 1.5 Million Soviet Jews is Released

“The Black Book,” a lengthy, meticulously detailed documentation which provides “irrefutable evidence” of the Nazi slaughter of 1,500,000 Soviet Jews, one-fourth the total number of Jews slain in the Holocaust, was the focus of a reception yesterday marking its release in English for the first time.

Speaking to some 200 people at the Halloran House here, Theodore Freedman, national director of the program division of the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith, related the story behind the publication. He said the book was originally approved for publication in 1948, but was then removed from the presses by Stalin when Soviet policy became anti-Israel. Every sign of the book was erased, he explained. The type was killed, books already printed were destroyed and the manuscript was “obliterated.”

But according to Freedman, one copy was preserved and smuggled into Israel where it was acquired by Yad Vashem, the Martyrs’ and Heroes’ Remembrance Authority in Jerusalem, and subsequently published by them in 1980 in the original Russian.

“The Black Book,” compiled and edited by Soviet authors ilya Ehrenburg and Vasily Grossman, is a collection of diaries, private letters and eyewitness accounts by Jews who escaped annihilation in such Nazi massacre sites as Babi Yar, Rumbuli, Berdichev, Ponary, Vinnitsa, Kharkov, Minsk, Vilna, Treblinka, Sobibor, Auschwitz, and others in Nazi-occupied Russia and Poland. It was translated from the Russian by John Glad and James Levine.

Among those addressing the reception, co-sponsored by the ADL’s Center for Studies on the Holacaust, The Holocaust Library which published the book, and Schocken Books, its distributor, was the noted author Elie Wiesel, who praised the book. He declared that “very few volumes have the depth, the strength, the tears, the courage and the information” that this book provides.