The Fate of The Black Book in The USSR
According to Ehrenburg, the mandatory State literary commission did not commit to publish the Book in October 1944: "Instead of a straight answer, the resolution was: 'write the book, and if it comes out well, it would be published.' But it is not we who are the authors, it is the fascists… What does that mean, 'comes out well' this is not a novel, it is a document."
The Book was partially printed in the Soviet Union by the Yiddish publisher Der Emes, however the entire edition, the typefaces, as well as the manuscript, were destroyed. First the censors ordered changes in the text to conceal the specifically anti-Jewish character of the atrocities and to downplay the role of Ukrainians who worked as Nazi police officers. Then in 1948 the Soviet edition of the book was scrapped completely. The collection of original documents that Ehrenburg handed down to the Vilnius Jewish Museum after the war was secretly returned to him upon the Museum's termination in 1948. The JAC was also disbanded, its members purged at the outset of the state campaign against the "rootless cosmopolitans", a Soviet euphemism for Jews. (See also the Doctors' plot). Typically, the official Soviet policy regarding the Holocaust was to present it as atrocities committed against Soviet citizens, without acknowledging the genocide of the Jews.
A Russian-language edition of the Black Book was published in Jerusalem in 1980, and finally in Kiev, Ukraine in 1991.
Read more about this topic: Black Book (World War II)
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