Black Book ( World War II ) The Black Book : The Ruthless Murder of Jews by German - Fascist Invaders Throughout the Temporarily - Occupied Regions of the Soviet Union and in the German Nazi Death Camps established on occupied Polish soil during the War 1941 – 1945 alternatively The Black Book of the Holocaust , or simply The Black Book , ( , " Chornaya Kniga " ; Yiddish transliteration : " Dos Shvartzer Bukh " ) was a result of the collaborative effort by the Jewish Anti - Fascist Committee ( JAC ) and members of the American Jewish community to document the anti - Jewish crimes of the Holocaust and the participation of Jews in the fighting and the resistance movement against the Nazis during World War II . Background . Prominent Jewish Soviet writers and journalists Ilya Ehrenburg and Vasily Grossman served as war reporters for the Red Army . Grossman ' s documentary reports of the opening of the Treblinka and Majdanek extermination camp s were some of the first eyewitness accounts — as early as 1943 — of what later became known as the Shoah . His article " The Treblinka Hell " ( Треблинский ад , 1944 ) was disseminated at the Nuremberg Trials as a document for the prosecution . Manuscripts and publications . In 1944 – 1945 , based on their own experiences and on other documents they collected , Ehrenburg and Grossman produced two volumes under the title " Murder of the People " in Yiddish and handed the manuscript to the JAC . Copies were sent to the United States , the British mandate of Palestine ( now Israel ) and Romania in 1946 , and excerpts were published in the United States in English under the title " Black Book " that same year . In Romania , a part of the manuscript was also published in 1946 . It was also printed in Israel . A handwritten manuscript of the book is held at Yad Vashem . The fate of the Black Book in the USSR . According to Ehrenburg , the mandatory State literary commission did not commit to publish the Book in October 1944 : " Instead of a straight answer , the resolution was : ' write the book , and if it comes out well , it would be published . ' But it is not we who are the authors , it is the fascists … What does that mean , ' comes out well ' this is not a novel , it is a document . " The Book was partially printed in the Soviet Union by the Yiddish publisher " Der Emes " , however the entire edition , the typefaces , as well as the manuscript , were destroyed . First the censors ordered changes in the text to conceal the specifically anti - Jewish character of the atrocities and to downplay the role of Ukrainians who worked as Nazi police officers . Then in 1948 the Soviet edition of the book was scrapped completely . The collection of original documents that Ehrenburg handed down to the Vilnius Jewish Museum after the war was secretly returned to him upon the Museum ' s termination in 1948 . The JAC was also disbanded , its members purged at the outset of the state campaign against the " rootless cosmopolitan s " , a Soviet euphemism for Jews . ( See also the Doctors ' plot ) . Typically , the official Soviet policy regarding the Holocaust was to present it as atrocities committed against Soviet citizens , without acknowledging the genocide of the Jews . ( source ? ) A Russian - language edition of the Black Book was published in Jerusalem in 1980 , and finally in Kiev , Ukraine in 1991 .