The Unknown Black Book: The Holocaust in the German-Occupied Soviet Territories

The Unknown Black Book provides, for the first time in English, 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. These documents, from residents of cities, small towns, and rural areas, 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, Vasily Grossman and Ilya Ehrenburg, 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, which often occurred.

"The most comprehensive English collection of wartime and early postwar diaries, letters, testimonies, and other documents penned by Jewish victims and survivors of the Holocaust in the territories of Ukraine, Belorussia, Russia, and the Baltics. Anyone interested in studying and trying to make sense of the cruelty, collective violence, inhumane suffering, and trauma of genocide should read this unfiltered, detailed evidence of the Holocaust's impact on individuals and society." - Wendy Lower, author of Nazi Empire-Building and the Holocaust in Ukraine

"A unique source for a fuller understanding of the tragic events during these dark years." - Walter Laqueur, editor of The Holocaust Encyclopedia

"The Unknown Black Book invites the reader to enter an almost unimaginable world where atrocity became a way of life and survival a miracle...Killing on the Eastern front was raw and unmediated violence. The Unknown Black Book captures that grim reality of rave murder and at the same time disarms denial." - Richard Overy, author of The Dictators: Hitler's Germany, Stalin's Russia