The Pittsburgh Press (November 28, 1944)
Six million Jews listed slaughtered
Russians to detail massacres by Nazis
Moscow, USSR (UP) –
A five-volume “black book” containing a documentary record of the German massacre of approximately six million European Jews was being prepared today by the state publishing house.
The first volume has been completed and will be distributed before Jan. 1.
The work was under the general editorship of Ilya Ehrenburg and the editorial board included poet-playwright Konstantin Simonov, writer Vsevolod Ivanov and poetess Vera Inber.
Four categories
The “black book” will contain four categories: German decrees and orders of the day; eyewitness accounts of survivors of murder camps; diaries and letters of the victims, and accounts by non-Jews who aided in the escape of certain prisoners.
The “black book” will show that systematic annihilation of the Jews began in 1939 and was carried out in eight principal places with death methods including gas chamber asphyxiation, electrocution, firing squads, bacterial inoculation and with carbon monoxide chambers.
Catholics also killed
One of the largest camps was operated near Warsaw where a majority of Polish Jews and many Polish Catholics were killed, the “black book” editors said.
Of Poland’s pre-war Jewish population of 3,100,000, about 250,000 were known to be in Russia. All of the others, who had been under German rule, were killed with the exception of 8,000 escapees, the editors estimated.
Among letters left behind by victims was from a woman and a girl addressed to their husband and father, “M. Wishner, 196 Central Ave., Orange, NJ.”
“They’re coming to murder us,” the wife wrote. “The only thing you can do is to avenge us.”
The little daughter scribbled: “I want to live. I am afraid to die.”