The Black Book

The Documentary Podcast

BBC

Society & Culture, Documentary, Personal Journals

4.3 • 2.6K Ratings

🗓️ 21 January 2023

⏱️ 50 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

As the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union swept over vast areas of Ukraine and Belorussia from the summer of 1941, over three million Jews were deliberately targeted for annihilation. Shot, hung, butchered, a million and a half Jewish souls were buried in vast pits in Babi Yar, Rumbula, Mariupol, Minsk, Kyiv and Riga. Many accounts began to flood into the Soviet Union where journalist and writer Ilya Ehrenburg began gathering testimonies of the mass murder. This became The Black Book, a chronicle of the Nazi extermination of Soviet Jews. Historian Catherine Merridale travels to Riga, Latvia and Yad Vashem, where the Black Book was smuggled, to uncover this complex story of loss, silence and rediscovery.

Transcript

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0:00.0	The comb is the podcast that seeks out stories and voices from across Africa, but otherwise
0:06.1	might go unheard. Each week we focus on a single story that matters.
0:11.5	The comb. Find out more at the end of this podcast.
0:16.7	You are listening to the BBC World Service. I'm Catherine Meridale. I'm a historian
0:21.8	of Soviet Russia and this is the story of the black book. I cannot write.
0:28.0	If I begin to describe the things I experienced, I don't know if you would understand.
0:34.0	It is the first testimony about the Holocaust and the Soviet Union.
0:38.2	Maybe even the more important story it is that monument. It is a memorial project.
0:44.9	Imagine if the earth could speak. Imagine if the doomed could leave a memoir for all time.
0:52.4	They did.
0:53.7	They killed eight-year-old Hannah Lerna for being too old and Mania Fienenberg's month-old
0:59.9	baby for being too young.
1:02.2	We think we know about the Holocaust. We picture Auschwitz and the camps.
1:07.2	But the mass murders began in the old USSR, in Ukraine, Belarus and the Baltic states.
1:14.3	The black book told their story, often from first hand reports, but Stalin had it all
1:20.0	suppressed. Then we were heard along the edge of the ditch, but there was no longer any real
1:25.3	edge, since the trench was filled with people for a half-kilometer.
1:29.4	They really are among the first documentation of what was happening in the eastern front
1:35.6	of the Holocaust, of the Holocaust by bullets.
1:38.5	As soon as the columns arrived, everyone was ordered to undress. Boots had to be put in
1:43.6	one pile, galoshes in another.
1:49.4	The black book is really an extraordinary anthology, organized while the catastrophe was still unfolding.
	...

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