The Bones of Berdichev

A biography of the Russian writer and frontline journalist in World War II, Vasilii Grossman. He was the first who documented the Holocaust, as early as 1943; in 1944-46 he was a member of the Literary Commission of the Jewish Antifascist Committee and an editor and compiler of the "Black Book". Grossman was born in Berdichev where, in September 1941, the Nazis staged the first mass execution of Jews - more than 10,000 were murdered. In January 1944 Grossman visited Berdichev, recently liberated, and interviewed witnesses of the tragedy. During the war, Soviet authorities began to suppress accounts of the Nazi Holocaust and of local antisemitism and collaboration with the Nazis. In his postwar writings, Grossman stressed these aspects of the war, an act which aggravated his relationship with the authorities. The "Prologue" (pp. 1-30) relates how the Holocaust was perpetrated in the Soviet Union, and how the Berdichev ghetto was established and annihilated.