Ilya Altman

After WWII some famous Jewish writers in the Soviet Union gathered stories of the holocaust in their country. A version was published in the US, I think in Yiddish and English, but the original version was suppressed by Stalin or his peeps because it made mention of all the help the Germans got from the Ukrainians, Latvians, etc - and the policy became to only refer to the victims as Soviet citizens. This book is the part that wasn't published. It was finally published in Jerusalem and Moscow by Yad Vashem in 1993. I find multiple stories of this kind from the holocaust to be considerably more depressing than straight histories.… (mais)

This book is a collection of testimonies about the Holocaust in Russia and the Soviet satellite states which, mainly for political reasons, didn't make it into the regular Black Book and weren't published until now. Hence, the Unknown Black Book.

A word to the wise: reading this is like sticking your head inside a charnel house and taking a big whiff. Every page is spattered in gore. Many scenes described therein would be unacceptable even in a Hollywood horror film. That said, it actually tends to get rather dull. Because every story is basically the same, page after page of houses looted, people beaten, people humiliated, women raped, people tortured, people killed in all sorts of horrible ways. Yawn.

This is a good collection of primary source testimonies on the Holocaust in the USSR, particularly the Einsatzgruppen, but it's hardly beach reading.… (mais)