Vasily Grossman helped compile The Black Book

Person: Vasily Grossman
Lived: 1905–1964
Field: Novelist & war correspondent
From: Soviet

The story

Vasily Grossman was born in 1905 into a Jewish family in Berdichev, Ukraine, and grew up largely without a traditional Jewish education. In September 1941 the town's Jews were herded into a ghetto and shot in pits outside the town; on a single day, 15 September, more than 10,000 were murdered. Among them was his mother, Yekaterina, a teacher of French. As a war correspondent advancing with the Red Army in 1943 and 1944, Grossman saw the mass graves at Babi Yar, in Berdichev and elsewhere across Ukraine, and he resolved that the victims should not be forgotten.

Together with the writer Ilya Ehrenburg, he helped compile The Black Book, a project of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee carried out with members of the American Jewish community. Its roughly 500 pages gathered letters, diaries and the testimony of eyewitnesses recording the Nazi murder of Jews in the occupied regions of the Soviet Union and in the death camps on Polish soil from 1941 to 1945. It also recorded Jewish resistance. Grossman's own reports on Treblinka and Majdanek were among the earliest eyewitness accounts of the camps.

The book revealed that the Nazi genocide had begun on Soviet soil, that its main targets were Jews and that some local people had helped the killers. That contradicted the official line, which spoke only of crimes against Soviet citizens. Censors first ordered changes to hide the specifically anti-Jewish character of the atrocities and to play down the role of Ukrainians who served as police. A Yiddish printing was partly made and then destroyed, and in 1948 the Soviet edition was scrapped entirely, as the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee was disbanded and its leaders purged.

According to Wikipedia, the suppression shook Grossman to the core and led him to question his loyalty to the Soviet state. The later campaign against so-called cosmopolitans reawakened his sense of being Jewish.

But the evidence had been gathered, and copies had already been sent abroad in 1946. A Russian edition appeared in Jerusalem in 1980 and in Kiev in 1991, and English editions followed. The testimony Grossman and Ehrenburg collected stands as a vital record of the destruction of Soviet Jewry.

Why it matters

The Black Book preserved crucial testimony about the Holocaust in the Soviet Union, keeping the memory of its victims alive despite decades of censorship.

About Vasily Grossman

Red Army correspondent who wrote one of the first accounts of a Nazi death camp, then the novel Life and Fate, so dangerous to the Soviet state that the KGB “arrested” the manuscript.

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Vasily Grossman

1905–1964 · Novelist & war correspondent

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