The Complete Black Book of Russian Jewry

Vasily Grossman

• Éditeur: Routledge
• Année: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351484657
• Édition: 1
• Sujet: Social Sciences
• Sous-sujet: Jewish Studies

The Complete Black Book of Russian Jewry is a collection of eyewitness testimonies, letters, diaries, affidavits, and other documents on the activities of the Nazis against Jews in the camps, ghettoes, and towns of Eastern Europe. Arguably, the only apt comparism is to The Gulag Archipelago of Alexander Solzhenitsyn. This definitive edition of The Black Book, including for the first time materials omitted from previous editions, is a major addition to the literature on the Holocaust. It will be of particular interest to students, teachers, and scholars of the Holocaust and those interested in the history of Europe.

By the end of 1942, 1.4 million Jews had been killed by the Einsatzgruppen that followed the German army eastward; by the end of the war, nearly two million had been murdered in Russia and Eastern Europe. Of the six million Jews who perished in the Holocaust, about one-third fell in the territories of the USSR. The single most important text documenting that slaughter is The Black Book, compiled by two renowned Russian authors Ilya Ehrenburg and Vasily Grossman. Until now, The Black Book was only available in English in truncated editions. Because of its profound significance, this new and definitive English translation of The Complete Black Book of Russian Jewry is a major literary and intellectual event.

From the time of the outbreak of the war, Ehrenburg and Grossman collected the eyewitness testimonies that went into The Black Book. As early as 1943 they were planning its publication; the first edition appeared in 1944. During the years immediately after the war, Grossman assisted Ehrenburg in compiling additional materials for a second edition, which appeared in 1946 (in English as well as Russian).

Since the fall of the Soviet regime, Irina Ehrenburg, the daughter of Ilya Ehrenburg, has recovered the lost portions of the manuscript sent to Yad Vashem. The texts recove

Part 1 The Ukraine

Kiev: Babi Yar

German troops entered Kiev on 19 September 1941.

{On that very day and in that very hour the Germans broke into stores on Bessarabka Street and looted them. House porters would not let residents out of their courtyards. Here on Bessarabka Street several Jews were detained. Nesya Elgort returned home from Bessarabka Street (to No. 40 Saksaganskaya Street) and found everyone in her huge family gathered together. Looking upon all her children, as though longing to hide them away from the enemy, the old grandmother Dina Shmulevna cried out, “My God, where shall we flee?”

On 21 September family head Beri Gertsvich and his daughter Nesya-Roza went to Stalinka to check on their apartment. Toward evening Roza returned and told the family that the Germans had taken their father away to some place unknown. The next morning Roza decided to make inquiries about her father. But she did not know where to go. She and her brother Ilyusha went to the commandant. He asked her about only one thing: her nationality. Once he discovered that she was a Jew, he drove her away from the premises.

On Lenin Street she saw Germans beating some Jewish men on the legs and forcing them to dance. Then they forced the men they had beaten to load heavy crates onto a truck. The men collapsed under the unbearable load. The Germans beat them with rubber truncheons.}¹

On 22 September the people of Kiev were awakened by a powerful explosion. Smoke and the smell of something burning came from the direction of Kreshchatik Street.

{On the streets adjoining Kreshchatik the Germans drove people into the flames. A German ran past the building where Nesya Elgort was standing on Saksaganskaya Street. He glanced at her, raised his hand to his cheek, and in the direction of the explosions shouted, “Partisan, Jude, kaputt!”}

On that very day the Germans posted an announcement written in Ukrainian on the walls of the buildings. It stated that Jews, communists, commissars, and partisans would be wiped out. {A reward of two hundred rubles was offered for each partisan or communist turned in. Such announcements were also posted on Red Army Street and other streets of the city.

Life in Kiev became intolerable. The Germans broke into homes, seized people, and took them away to some unknown place; these people never returned. The Elgort family moved out of their apartment and into a cellar. It became Nesya’s job to obtain food, since she did not look Jewish. The Elgort family spent several days in the cellar under such conditions. Whenever Nesya happened to go out, the house porter Pavlo Davidchenko, who knew about the family’s predicament, would say, “What are you hiding here for? You’ll still be transported out of Kiev.”

Meanwhile, collaborating with the Germans, he continued to clean the apartments of the building assigned to him.

One day while out looking for her mother-in-law Giti Elgort (who had left to inquire about her apartment on Zhilyanskaya Street) Nesya unexpectedly ran into her father. His appearance horrified her. He had been captured by the Germans and thrown into a damp cellar along with a group of Jews, among whom was a rabbi; there they were mocked and humiliated. Several of the men were tortured, but Nesya’s father and the rabbi were saved by some miracle. Tears ran down the old man’s sunken cheeks as he told his story.

On 22 September}a mass beating of the Jews took place in the streets of the city near the water towers and in the parks.

On the second or third day of the German occupation, many residents of Kiev, especially in the areas of Podol and Slobodka, saw the bloated bodies of old men and children who had been tortured to death floating down the Dnieper. {On Friday and Saturday, 26 and 27 September, Jews who went to synagogue did not return home. Evgeniya Litoshchenko, a citizen of Kiev, testified that her neighbors, an old man named Shneider and Mr. and Mrs. Rosenblat, did not come home from synagogue. She saw their bodies in the Dnieper. This was confirmed by T. Mikhaseva. Synagogues were surrounded by Germans and Ukrainian policemen with automatic weapons. In several places in Kiev bags containing religious articles washed up on the banks of the Dnieper.

Whenever the police or Gestapo agents spotted someone with dark hair, they demanded to see a passport. Jews were beaten and taken to the police station or to Gestapo headquarters. At night they were shot.

On the fifth day after the arrival of the Germans in Kiev, V. Liberman took advantage of the fact that his house register had been burned and a new house manager had been named: he decided to pretend to be a Karaite² and changed his name from Liberman to Libermanov.

On 24 September he left his home, walked down Korolenko Street, and turned onto Tolstoy Square. A tall man wearing a cap and a black coat walked up to him. The man ordered him to stop and demanded to see his passport. Liberman refused to show his passport to someone unknown to him. Indeed, he did not have his passport with him; he kept it hidden at home. “I am an agent of the Ukrainian Political Police,” the man declared in an irritated voice. “Show me your passport. I suspect that you are a Jew.” Liberman answered, “I am a Karaite by nationality; my passport has been stolen.” The police agent ordered Liberman to follow him.

As he was walking down Kreshchatik, Liberman saw a car with a huge megaphone making frequent stops; a loud voice was coming over the megaphone, shouting, “Report the whereabouts of communists, partisans, and Jews to the Gestapo and to the police! Report them!”

The police agent took Liberman into a movie theater on Kreshchatik not from Proresnaya Street. A Gestapo soldier—a tall, muscular man—gave him a sharp blow in the back and shoved him into the foyer. Liberman went through the foyer and into the auditorium. More than three hundred Jews were sitting there. Most of them were old men with gray beards. All of them were sitting in deep silence. Liberman sat down next to a young Jew, who whispered to him, “They’re going to take us to Syrets to work, and tonight we’ll be shot.”

Liberman walked up to a broken window in the foyer of the theater and, secretly hoping to see his wife, looked at the people walking up and down Kreshchatik Street. He happened to notice a resident from the building where he lived going past the theater and called him to the window. Without explaining the reason for his arrest, Liberman asked the man to tell his wife that he was being held in the theater.

Soon, sneaking along the street, Liberman’s wife Valentina Berezleva came up to the window. Taking advantage of the fact that no one was in the foyer, Liberman said to her, “Valya, I’ve been passing myself off as a Karaite. Go get signatures from Mikhailov, Goncharenko, and Pasichny certifying that I am a Karaite. The Gestapo agents are preparing a bloody fate for the Jews.”

Berezleva went over to the Gestapo agents and offered them an impassioned plea to set her husband free, declaring that she, Valentina Berezleva, was a Russian and that her husband was a Karaite. Before she could finish, one of the Gestapo men shoved her as hard as he could. She fell down the steps of the theater and struck her head on the sidewalk. Then she went home.

Liberman sensed that every passing hour drew him and the Jews in the theater closer to death. But chance saved him and all the others. At two o’clock in the afternoon on 24 September a very loud explosion went off near the theater. Liberman jumped out the broken window. Terrified people were madly rushing up and down Kreshchatik. A woman covered with blood and a man with no hands ran by. Thick, yellow clouds of smoke billowed through the street. A second explosion came immediately after the first. Twenty or thirty minutes went by. With a cry of “Feuerl” [Fire!] the Gestapo agents abandoned their posts at the theater entrance and fled. Once they saw that the Gestapo agents had run away, the Jews hurried off to their homes.

Upon arriving home, Liberman discovered that his wife had burned his passport, all his documents, his articles, and photographs of his parents. Liberman’s friends—A. K. Mikhailov, D. L. Pasichny, and F. I. Goncharenko—had provided him with their signatures certifying that he was a Karaite.

Liberman decided not to show his face in the courtyard or on the street. His wife camouflaged the entrance to their small kitchen, and for days on end he sat there like a prisoner, looking out the narrow window at a small patch of blue sky.}

In the evenings the sky was tinged with the crimson reflection of a gigantic fire. Put to the torch, Kreshchatik was ablaze for six days.

On 27-28 September 1941, a week after the Germans’ arrival in Kiev, announcements printed in bold letters on coarse blue paper, in Russian and Ukrainian, appeared on the walls of the buildings:

Kikes of Kiev and the surrounding area! On Monday, 29 September, at 7:00 A.M. you are to appear with your belongings, money, documents, valuables, and warm clothing on Dorogozhitskaya Street next to the Jewish cemetery. Failure to appear is punishable by death. Hiding kikes is punishable by death.

There was no signature on this terrible decree that condemned seventy thousand people to death.

The Gestapo continued to perpetrate such outrages on the streets and in the buildings of Kiev until 29 September.

{On 28 September at the Galitsky Market, the Germans detained seventy-five-year-old Gersh Abovich Grinberg (22 Volodarskaya Street), the head of a large family, among whom are many engineers, doctors, pharmacists, educators, and writers. They robbed him, stripped him, and tortured him to death like animals. Grinberg’s wife, an elderly lady named Telya Osinova, never heard from him again. She spent the day baking, cooking, and packing things to get ready for the trip. Within twenty-four hours, on 29 September, she perished at Babi Yar.}³

On Zhilyanskaya Street the Germans seized engineer I. L. Edelman, brother of the well known pianist and Kiev conservatory professor A. L. Edelman. They threw him head first into a barrel standing under a drainpipe and drowned him.

B. A. Libman tells a story about one Jewish family that was hiding in a basement for several days. The mother decided to take her two children and go to the country. Some drunken Germans stopped them at the Galitsky Market and subjected them to a cruel punishment. They cut off the head of one child and killed the other right before the mother’s eyes. The woman went out of her mind and held the bodies of her dead children to her bosom. Once the Hitlerites had had their fill of the spectacle, they murdered her too. {After hurrying to the site where his family had perished, the father was also murdered.

Two days prior to the events at Babi Yar the elderly musician Efim Borisovich Pikus went to the German commandant to obtain permission to stay with his sick wife L. G. Pikus; she was not strong enough to go outside. The old man did not return home. His wife and son were dead within two days.

Many Kievans knew the attorney Tsiperovich, a highly educated man who lived at 41 Pushkin Street. He and his wife were shot.

The Germans pursued the pianist Bella Zinovevna Grinberg and her cousin Rozalie Naumovna Kapustina into the Lukyanovka cemetery. They never returned.

The young writer Mark Chudnovsky was not able to be evacuated from Kiev at his assigned time because he was ill. His wife, a Russian woman, would not let her husband go to Lukyanovka alone; she knew what awaited him there. “We spent days of joy together,” she said to him, “and I won’t abandon you now.” The two of them went to Lukyanovka and there died together.}

The fascists shot Professor S. U. Satanovsky of the Kiev conservatory and his family.

{Anatoli Sandomirsky, a mathematician and chess player, lived at 36 Saksaganskaya Street. Having been sick with encephalitis for several years, he was bed-ridden. The Germans carried him outside; he perished on the street.}

The SS dragged a paralyzed old woman named Sofya Goldovskaya out of her home at 27 Saksaganskaya and murdered her. She was the mother of ten children.

Another old woman, Sarra Maksimovna Evenson, had been an organizer of political circles, a propagandist, and the editor of the newspaper Volyn in Zhitomir during the pre-revolution-ary period. She wrote many articles (under the pseudonym of S. Maksimov). {She was the first to translate Feuchtwanger⁴ and a number of other writers of the new age into Russian. She had thoroughly mastered the West European languages and corresponded with dozens of artistic and cultural figures.

Because of her advanced years and ill health, S. M. Evenson was not allowed to be evacuated from Kiev. She had not left her home for the last two years.} The Hitlerites threw this woman who had great-grandchildren from a third-story window. {An elderly lady named Khana Itskovna Kaganova, the mother of an army doctor, and Mednikova, the mother of several soldiers, were denounced by the house manager Gontkovsky (12 Tarasovskaya Street) and savagely tortured by the Germans. The Germans also murdered Regina Lazarevna Magat (10 Gorky Street), the mother of a professor of medicine and biology who was killed on the front.} The well-known attorney llya Lvovich Babat and his two granddaughters, Polina and Malvina, died from German bullets. {Germans and house porters working for the police took old people who could not move from their apartments and left them on the streets and sidewalks. The old ones died from cold, hunger, and the indifference of those around them.

The composer and conductor Chaim Yampolsky worked for many years on the Radio Committee and in the orchestra of the Kiev Circus. Yampolsky is the author of major compositions, primarily on Jewish and Ukrainian themes, and his renditions of Jewish folk songs are quite popular. The brother-in-law of the world-renowned violinist Miron Poly akin, Yampolsky was Polyakin’s first teacher and the first to open the way for Polyakin into music. Chaim Yampolsky’s children are musicians: Vera, Vladimir, and Elena are pianists, and Gerts is a violinist. The Germans showed up for the old man at the Radio Committee. They took him away immediately after rehearsal, and Yampolsky never returned.

Bella Aleksandrovna Libman (who now works in Kiev as a secretary-machinist) writes about her father, son-in-law, and other relatives who perished:

The residents of the apartment building where we had spent so many years say that Papa understood perfectly why the Jews, these eternal martyrs, had been gathered together. It is said that he wept so uncontrollably that even the most hardened of people could not look upon him without losing their composure. He went off to the cemetery with several elderly residents of the building, under the eyes of whom I grew up. I know of a building at No. 6 Volodarsky Avenue in which fourteen Jewish families perished; my aunt Sofya Shumaya and her husband were among them. One of the survivors was a Russian woman, an old nanny who had brought up my aunt’s children, who are now soldiers in the Red Army. The nanny accompanied my aunt and uncle to the cemetery.}

Moisey Grigorevich Benyash, a professor of bacteriology renowned throughout Europe, also perished at that time, along with his sister and niece.

But all this was just the prelude to mass murder. At dawn on 29 September, the Jews of Kiev were moving slowly along the streets from various parts of the city toward the Jewish cemetery on Lukyanovka. Many of them thought they were being sent to provincial towns. {Some of them understood that Babi Yar meant death. Therefore on that day there were many suicides.}

Families had baked bread, sewn knapsacks, and rented wagons and carts for the journey. Old men and women walked along supporting each other. Mothers carried their infants in their arms or pushed them in baby carriages. People were carrying sacks, bundles, suitcases, and boxes. Children plodded along with their parents. Young people brought nothing with them, but the elderly tried to take everything they could from home. Leading them by the hand, grandchildren walked with old women who were pale and had difficulty breathing. Those who were sick or paralyzed were borne on stretchers, blankets, and sheets.

A crowd of people flowed along Lvov Street in an uninterrupted stream, as German patrols stood on the sidewalks. {The number of people moving along the pavement from early in the morning until late at night was so great that it was difficult to c...

Table des matières

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Translator’s Preface, David Patterson
• Foreword, Irving Louis Horowitz
• Introduction, Helen Segall
• Introduction to the Russian Edition, Irina Ehrenburg
• From the Editors of The Black Book
• Preface, Vasily Grossman
• Part 1: The Ukraine
• Part 2: Belorussia
• Part 3: The Russian Soviet Federated Socialist Republie
• Part 4: Lithuania
• Part 5: Latvia
• Part 6: The Soviet People are United
• Part 7: The Annihilation Camps
• Part 8: Executioners