BBC World Service

On 22 June, 1941, Nazi troops swept over the Soviet border at the launch of Operation Barbarossa.  No-one was prepared for what followed, which included bombing, arson and merciless attacks on civilians.  But not all civilians were treated in the same way.  Ethnic Russians might survive or escape, but ethnic Jewish Soviets faced almost certain death.  Hitler’s campaign of slaughter, later infamous as the Final Solution, began on Soviet soil.  There, long before the exterminations at Auschwitz, almost two million Jewish civilians – many of them women, the elderly, or small children – were shot, clubbed, suffocated or buried alive.

They did not die without lament.  Even as the murders were happening, witnesses began to write to Ilya Ehrenburg, the novelist turned war-writer that they all trusted most.  The letters poured in by the day; thousands of them.  It was Ehrenburg’s intention to edit them as a book, a literary memorial to all that was being lost.  Indeed, he and a small group of fellow-writers succeeded in preparing a manuscript and submitting it for print.  But Stalin had the book suppressed.  The post-war world was not one where the stories suited him.

The Black Book wasn’t published until the 1980s, which is why its story, the story of the Holocaust by bullet, has been neglected in our overall narrative of the Holocaust (and, indeed, of the war itself).  This documentary reconstructs what happened, from the earliest murders in Ukraine through shocked discovery, eye-witnessing and censorship and on into the present day.

The programme aired on the BBC World Service on Saturday 21 January 2023 at 19:06 local time and on Sunday 22 January 2023 at 12.06 local time and was produced for the BBC by Mark Burman. It is available on BBC Sounds.