books:

	The Unknown Black Book: The Holocaust in the German-Occupied Soviet Territories Indiana University Press, 2007 - 446 pages average customer review:based on 7 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

"The most comprehensive English collection of wartime and early postwar diaries, letters, testimonies, and other documents penned by Jewish victims and survivors of the Holocaust in the territories of Ukraine, Belorussia, Russia, and the Baltics. Anyone interested in studying and trying to make sense of the cruelty, collective violence, inhumane suffering, and trauma of genocide should read this unfiltered, detailed evidence of the Holocaust's impact on individuals and society." - Wendy Lower, author of Nazi Empire-Building and the Holocaust in Ukraine

"A unique source for a fuller understanding of the tragic events during these dark years." - Walter Laqueur, editor of The Holocaust Encyclopedia

"The Unknown Black Book invites the reader to enter an almost unimaginable world where atrocity became a way of life and survival a miracle...Killing on the Eastern front was raw and unmediated violence. The Unknown Black Book captures that grim reality of rave murder and at the same time disarms denial." - Richard Overy, author of The Dictators: Hitler's Germany, Stalin's Russia

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Weeping in Babylon

It's a rare reader who'll be able to get through The Unknown Black Book without having to walk away from it several times. The tragedies it documents are just too horrible to bear except in small doses. Both text and photographs stun the imagination and freeze the heart.

The UBB is a narrative history of Nazi atrocities against the Jews in the German-occupied Soviet territories (Ukraine, Belorussia, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, The Crimea, and Russia) during WWII. It contains 93 documents, almost half of which are written by eyewitnesses. The rest are compilations of various eyewitness accounts by the editors, a couple of Soviet Jewish journalists, Ilya Ehrenburg and Vasily Grossman, who began collecting material as early as 1942. The eyewitness accounts include diaries, letters, and testimonies of those Russian Jews who managed to survive the wholescale exterminations carried out by the Eastern Front Einsatzgruppen (one of which was commanded by a direct descendant of the composer Franz Schubert).

What can one possibly say that makes sense of the horrors described by the survivors? Tsodik Yakovlevich Bleyman, the sole survivor of the shtetl of Utyan, tells of being driven into the forest with dozens of men and women, who were then sprayed with machine gun fire by Lithuanian fascist collaborators (p. 310). Yevgenia Shendels tells of her father, a physician, being gunned down in the streets of Kursk because he resisted the Nazi murder of medical patients (p. 401). Tatyana Taranova, a student, remembers that one Jew was ill and in seclusion when an Einsatzgruppe exterminated everyone in his village. When he was told of their fate, he was simply unable to believe the fantastic tale. "He decided to ask the German commandant for help because he did not believe that they had shot the Jews. The commandant smiled and called over a soldier with a submachine gun, and the naive Jew was shot right there" (p. 209). Tales such as these defy comprehension. but they need to be told and heeded.

The UBB's own fate is almost as sad as the stories it documents. In 1942, just a few months after the German invasion of the USSR, the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee was formed to document German atrocities, publicize them throughout the world, and garner aid for the Soviet war effort. A parallel Jewish committee in the U.S., chaired by Albert Einstein, promised to publish an English version of the book when it was completed. The American "Black Book" was eventually released. But the Stalinist regime eventually decided that the Russian version was too "Zionist." In addition, the government was upset that the Russian version documented numerous cases of Russian collaboration with the Nazis, thereby revealing the extent of anti-semitism in the Soviet state. So the publication of the Russian Black Book was squelched, even though the manuscript was complete, and in 1952 Stalin executed some 13 "Zionist" Jews who had collaborated on the project.

The book surpressed by Stalin, the "Unknown" Black book, is finally available thanks to the efforts of the editors of this edition.

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Brilliant part of history

In this amazing and original history we learn, finally, the first person accounts of the Nazi genocide perpetrated in Belarus, Ukraine and the Soviet Union by the Nazis during the Second World War. This part of the Holocaust has been only touched on elsewhereOrdinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland. Despite the fact that Holocaust Museums such as Yad Vashem have documented the Nazi road of terror and death in the Ukraine, few histories have examined this from the point of view of the people involved.

This book bridges this gap, taking the reader deep into the land that was once flowing with Jewish Shtetle life. Soviet eye-witnesses such as Vasily Grossman, one of Russia's most celebrated journalists, show us the eyewitness accounts of Nazi atrocities and reminds us that almost half of the victims of the Holocaust were murdered here.

An amazing story that turns the heart and will shock the reader and one that fills in this gap of history.

Seth J. Frantzman

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The Unkown Black Book

Amazing story of the German and Romainian occupation of Russia and Lithuania during the invasion of the Soviet Territories during the second world war and the attrocities perpetrated on their populations especially the Jewish population and the brutality they endured at the hands of the occupiers.


Unbelievable,but true

A very sad commentary involving the killing and mutilation of many thousands of innocent people. A book that must be read although at times it will be difficult to continue due to the very nature of the material presented.


great book

The Black Book, is a book incredibly great writen you will in enjoy it from the first page to the last!!!

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reviews: page 1, 2

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