The Unknown Black Book provides a revelatory compilation of testimonies from Jews who survived open-air massacres and other atrocities carried out by the Germans and their allies in the occupied Soviet territories during World War II-Ukraine, Belorussia, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, and Crimea. These documents are first-hand accounts by survivors of work camps, ghettos, forced marches, beatings, starvation, and disease. Collected under the direction of two renowned Soviet Jewish journalists, Ilya Ehrenburg and Vasily Grossman, they tell of Jews who lived in pits, walled-off corners of apartments, attics, and basement dugouts, unable to emerge due to fear that their neighbors would betray them, as often happened.

Powerful testimonies by Holocaust survivors

About the Author

Joshua Rubenstein is Northeast Regional Director of Amnesty International USA. He is author of Tangled Loyalties: The Life and Times of Ilya Ehrenburg, and editor (with Vladimir Naumov) of Stalin's Secret Pogrom: The Postwar Inquisition of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee.

Ilya Altman is Director of the Center for Holocaust Research and Education in Moscow and Editor-in-Chief of Encyclopedia of the Holocaust in the USSR (in Russian).

Reviews

The book offers a great many insights to the reader. . . . It is impossible here to give a full account of the wealth of material contained in the book. March 19, 2010

* Journal of Modern Jewish Studies *

These accounts from those who saw what happened convey what we cannot learn from official documents about the nature of this vast criminal enterprise, in which hundreds of thousands were transformed into monsters . . . and millions of others became helpless, dehumanized, mutilated, and finally forgotten victims.

* Wall Street Journal *

An essential work for anyone who wants to explore the depth of German and collaborationist crimes against the Jews.

* Holocaust and Genocide Studies *

The Unknown Black Book's main contribution is in exposing the English-speaking audience, for the first time, to one of the most terrible chapters of the Holocaust, as well as in challenging the current trend of presenting the Holocaust as merely another crime against humanity.

* Russian Review *

One of the most important sources on the Holocaust . . . [T]he editors and Indiana University Press have performed an invaluable service by preparing an English-language edition of The Unknown Black Book.

-- Timothy Snyder * Yale University *



Book Information
ISBN 9780253222671
Author Joshua Rubenstein
Format Paperback
Page Count 496
Imprint Indiana University Press
Publisher Indiana University Press
Weight(grams) 839g