The Complete Black Book of Russian Jewry

For those interested or curious about the format of this book, it's not your typical chapter-based book. Rather it is a VAST collection of stories submitted by survivors and witnesses. Some of them are very short, being a paragraph or two of powerful testimony, and some are detailed 20-page stories. Each 'collection' of stories are broken up by the country from which they occurred in. The end areas are slightly more broad in what they cover however it's all pertinent to Soviet suffering.The impact it will have on you will be a lasting one, it's difficult to describe, but you will think about these true events long after you are done with the book. They will be permanently implanted into your psyche. For example, the account of the staggering events at Babi Yar in the Ukraine describe so poignantly what happened at the ravine that day, your heart hurts. It is merely one story in this tome of horrors.There is, however, one complaint I have with this book. It is not regarding content, it is about the editing of the book. It is littered with grammar errors - far more than an average book. There is a glaring mistake probably once every three or four pages. Words are misspelled or entirely forgotten causing a stutter in the sentence. The editor, David Patterson, is apparently a professor and yet his grammar is horrible. If you're reading this David, send me a copy of the manuscript - I'll edit it for you, free of charge.

If you ever want to put life into perspective, read a page of The Complete Black Book of Russian Jewry a day. If you can. Where are you and what have you done?

A must read for those interested in Holocaust history.

This book was finally published in Russia for all to read in 1991 !

Written by two lackeys of the Soviet government, who had every reason to make the story lean in that direction.

Is this the English translation of the book published in Jerusalem in 1980? Margarita Aliger was the coauthor of that title, if I recall correctly.If you know, please reply by responding to this comment. Thanks.(BTW, haven't read the book, so I've given it five stars uslovno; if it's written by Grossman and Ehrenburg, it's guaranteed to be good, as far as I'm concerned)

I have just finished reading The Complete Black Book and will try to express the effect it has had on me. I am old enough to have been a WW11 veteran that was in Germany in 1945 and had met up with the Red Army soldiers in Braunschweig close to the Elbe River. I drove past the Bergan-Belsen concentration camp when the victims still alive were sitting on the ground by the road in their stripped uniforms.But now after so many years having passed, to read the Complete Black book leaves one in a state utterly disoriented and confounded as to the true nature of the human species.Lest one, at least of the younger generation, has not given thought to, or realized the depth to which human depravity can fall, or forgets, or wishes to forget, even though mayhem and mass murder persist in our contemporary world, one ought not be oblivious to the fact that human depravity is of serious concern. .We don't want to be reminded, its too stressful. Most of us who are alive and have a fleeting knowledge of the unbelievable, the facts that evoke frightening, painful thoughts. That monstrous catastrophe that had happened in the not too distant past is for most of us too difficult to feel the impact of its true nature. Though many victims are still among the living, that horrible event could only be treated by most as something we knew about and was easily forgotten. We cannot dwell on such hideous thoughts. If we are alive we must dance, sing and search for the way to happiness, that is the way of human nature. But wait, are we living amidst humans who are in possession of evil genes? Are we really frightened when it comes to thinking about what our species is really capable of?A grief stricken mournful cry of the ages against human violence was compiled and published by Ilya Ehrenburg and Vasily Grossman, in their monumental, soul searing work, "The Complete Black Book of Russian Jewry". Can this deliberate and depraved slaughter of millions of human beings be true; the crushing and tearing apart of every Jewish child the Hitlerites got their hands on? How is this possible from an advanced Western society, as was Germany, with its highly developed cultural life?Shocked by what he experienced and perceived to be the insane decision of the Germans to murder every Jew on the face of the Earth or at least every Jew they could get their hands on. Ilya Ehrenburg, the prodigious and serious writer that he was, felt in the extreme that it was his obligation to see that every detail, of the German atrocities he could uncover was preserved and duly placed on the record for all the world to know. With the support of the Soviet Jewish Antifascist Committee he with the equally great writer, Vasily Grossman, enlisted some twenty-four reporters to gather eyewitness accounts of the hideous torture and murder of Soviet Jews, captured Red Army soldiers and communists..By the fall of 1944 Ehrenburg and Grossman had a finished work ready for publication. Ehrenburg was most anxious to get the work printed and out to the world. But there were signs all around that this was not to happen so easily.First, and most depressing for Ehrenburg, were the roadblocks being placed before the work by the Jewish Antifascist Committee, they wanted to eliminate any references to the traitors among the Ukranians, Lithuanians and others who collaborated with the Germans openly, helping them to slaughter Jews. "Events soon discouraged him altogether" wrote Joshua Rubenstein. "Sometime in late 1944 over five hundred pages of The Black Book were sent to the United States for distribution. Ehrenburg was furious. No one had asked for his permission or even informed him of the request from America. Ehrenburg immediately understood that once the material appeared in the West it would be harder to publish in Moscow. He wanted the book to appear first in the Soviet Union where it was most needed to combat domestic anti-Semitism....Ehrenburg believed committee leaders deliberately undermined what he was trying to accomplish. Furious he broke off with the JAC and began referring to it as the `Judenrat' or the `anti-Jewish committee' in the presence of startled Jewish partisans." (1)With this going on Ehrenburg was fearful that his friend Stalin would not sanction the work. For the Soviet government, all Jews were Soviet citizens and recognized only as such. But clearly to Ehrenburg and Grossman there was no denial that the Jews alone were held in a special and separate category, targeted by the Germans for extermination. This the Germans exploited to further their imperialist ambitions with the propaganda that the Jews were the sole cause of all their troubles. Further obstacles hampered a quick publication of the Ehrenburg - Grossman work when an appeal was sent to Andrei Zhdanov, the new secretary of the Central Committee."He sent the letter to the propaganda department who responded that the Black Book had `grave political errors' and forbade publication."(2) This pretty much crushed Ehrenburg after the years of heroic work struggling to collect the facts and document the history of the excruciating human suffering of the Jews and the repugnant human depravity of the Germans. Until the time of his death in 1967, Ehrenburg, deeply saddened, had failed to see his wish fulfilled with the publication of his book in the Soviet Union "In 1993 the original Black Book, the version that had been approved for publication in 1946 and then forbidden in 1947 was finally published by the Jewish publishing houseYad in Vilnius."(3) This present edition, the English translation of the original 1993 edition was first published in 2002, "This is the book which Ilya Ehrenburg, and after his death, his daughter, Irina Ehrenburg dreamed and worked to have published."(4)To immerse one self in the task of recording the history as Ehrenburg and Grossman did was almost like submitting oneself to becoming a victim. Describing the hideous procedure, the cold and calculating German action, brutes capable of laughing and joking, of taking photographs of human beings, stripped of their clothing, forced to dig their own graves and lie in them to be shot while atop blood covered victims, already shot dead. The Spanish Inquisition with its thirty-two thousand burnt at the stake, though no less an atrocity, it could not reach the intensity of the German slaughter of the one and a half million Soviet Jews that the Einsatzgruppen with their machine guns blew out the brains of beautiful and good people while smashing the heads of babies against any hard surface.The lives of every Jew that fell into the hands of the German brutes was brought to a horrendous end. It was the determination of the Germans to torture and murder every captured Red Army soldier. The Red Army prisoner, M. Sheinman, stated:In the camp at Zhitomir the invaders first tried to exterminate all the Jews and political workers, so that they could then slowly and methodically exterminate thousans of prisoners of other nationalities. All the new arrivals had to file past a special "commission." The ones identified as Jews were turned over to the SS. They were housed separately from the other prisoners and forced to do the hardest and filthiest work. They were fed only once every three days. Every night the Gestapo and their dogs would go to the prisoners' barracks. The dogs would pounce on the people, biting and tearing at them. After being endlessly humiliated, they were taken outside of the town and shot....There were 1,500 people in Wesuw, most of whom were dying of tuberculosis. [After our liberation from Wesuw, British and Canadian soldiers and doctors came and asked those who were dying from tuberculosis how they had come to such a state. They heard shocking tales of how] the Germans sent young and healthy people, captured soldiers and officiers of the Red Army to mines and factories: there the prisoners were force to work fourteen and sixteen hours a day on one or two liters of soup made from grass and turnips and 250 grams of bread. People were subjected to humiliations and tortures never before heard of....But even in the death camps prisoners were not allowed to die peacefully. The butchers tortured them up to the last minutes of their lives with hunger, cold, beatings and other atrocities... Only the twisted mind of a sadist could have devised the system of torture that existed in the camps, especially for the officers, the politicals, and the Jews.The Black Book, is a record of a period of history of modern times, a history of human events that should stand today as a seminal work. It causes one to question the true nature of the human species, causes us, after experiencing,through the pages of the Black Book the shocking depths of depravity to which the human is capable of and has fallen. It is a worrisome thing when we stop and think about it.The power of The Black Book is reenforced and complimented with the publication of Jasenovac And The Holocaust In Yugoslavia by Barry M. Lituchy, a work in which the atrocities committed by the Germans in the Soviet Union are repeated under the guidance of the Germans in Yugoslavia.-This raises the question about whether the existance of the inate evil nature of the human is suppressed or encouraged to develop within the structure of the social system which nurtures it - broadly speaking - the two diametrically opposed systems - one capitalist and the other communist?This is a reminder that we cannot turn our backs on those millions trapped in the execution machine of the Germans and most cruelly slaughtered. The Black Book and Jasenovac, amongst others serve as a clear warning today when we still witness so much inhuman activity. In the preface of The Complete Black Book of Russian Jewrey Vasily Grossman wrote; "Here we should recall the words of Stalin, written in response to a request from the Jewish Telegraphic Agency in America:In answer to your question, nationalistic and racist chauvinism is a vestige of customs characteristic of a period of cannibalism. As the extreme form of racist chauvinism, anti-Semitism is the most dangerous vestige of cannabalism. Like a lightning rod protecting capitalism from the blow of the workers, anti-Semitism benefits their exploiters. Anti-Semitism is dangerous for workers, a false path leading them from the true way and luring them into a jungle. Therefore in keeping with their international outlook, communists cannot help but be the implacable and sworn enemies of anti-Semitism. In the USSR anti-Semitism is prosecuted in the most sever manner as a phenomenon deeply hostile to the Soviet order. In accordance with the laws of the USSR, active anti-Semites receive the death penalty. J.Stalin (6)1- Joshua Rubenstein, "Tangled Loyalties" p.2162- Ibid. p. 2173- Helen Segall, "Black Book" .p. xv4- Ibid.5- "Black Book" p.4306- Ibid. p.xxvPhilip SteinReview of The Complete Black Book of Russian Jewry byIlya Ehrenburg and Vasily Grossman

For a book to cost this much I have an issue with the number of spelling errors, typos and grammatical inconsistency I found in this book, which while enjoying the content detracted for my reading experience. So go ahead and make the rather substantial investment in this book.... but alert buyer beware!!!

Graphic, beyond horrifying, beyond sad, almost beyond understanding, it is completely absorbing. Some of the undisciplined events - hordes of people being machine-gunned, piled into pits, and frightened out of mind to absolutely no rational purpose - can barely be comprehended. What happened, not so long ago, should be read.

This was a birthday present for my sister and she tells me that the book is excellent and very interesting - for people who like history.

This book is written by the most important Soviet propaganda writers Ehrenburg and Grossman. Both writers and journalists who are great in words and manipulation. Both are also jews, so this book has also personal agenda. Book is a collection of "eyewitness testimonies", as usual without any proof or documentation. This is an important book to read, to understand where these hair rising stories come from. Communist have saying: "Keep lying, until lies become the truth"