The Holocaust in the German-Occupied Soviet Territories
What: Joshua Rubenstein, the co-editor of the book and the Northeast Regional Director of Amnesty International USA, will discuss first-hand accounts of World War II atrocities in Soviet territories.
When: Thursday, March 27 at 8 p.m.
Where: Reese Room in the Smith House on the Trinity campus.
Background: Rubenstein and Ilya Altman, Director of the Center for Holocaust Research and Education in Moscow, edited The Unknown Black Book: The Holocaust in the German-Occupied Soviet Territories. The book was published in 2007 by Indiana University Press in association with the United States Holocaust Museum in Washington D.C.
Of the six million Jews who perished in the Holocaust, more than 2.5 million died in areas controlled by the Soviet Union.
The book provides, for the first time in English, a 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. The documents contained in the book are first-hand accounts by survivors of work camps, ghettos, forced marches, beatings, starvation, and disease.
The testimonies, collected under the director of two renowned Soviet Jewish journalists, Vasily Grossman and Ilya Ehrenburg, tell of Jews who lived in pits, walled-off corners of apartments, attics and basement dugouts.
Included are stories of how non-Jewish residents of Lithuania, Belarus and other Soviet areas joined the advancing German troops in the slaughter of their Jewish neighbors. Other residents, though, risked their lives to shelter survivors.
The Unknown Black Book “makes for very disturbing reading,” wrote Omer Vartov, professor of European history and German studies at Brown University, in a review in The Wall Street Journal. “But these accounts from those who saw what happened convey very clearly what we cannot learn from official documents about the nature of this vast criminal enterprise, in which hundreds of thousands were transformed into monsters…and millions of others became helpless, dehumanized, mutilated and finally forgotten victims.”
The program is presented by the Jewish Studies Program at Trinity and is open to the public. For more information, call 860-297-2472.