ABSTRACT
To talk about anti-Semitism in Eastern Europe is in more than one way similar to talking about bad weather in Britain. According to the traditional master narrative on the subject, the Soviets’ attitude to the Holocaust could be described along the lines of concealment, virtual silence, or a retrospective silencing of the facts of the Soviet and European Jewry’s tragedy. Questionnaires made immediately after the liberation on the very spot contain the relatively open and honest “opinion” of the Soviet population. The Red Army’s and consequently the Soviet system’s greatest challenge on the liberated territories was the quick and effective reintegration of the territories formerly occupied by the Nazis and their population, into the war machinery. Polevoi explained that Auschwitz was one of the numerous Nazi death factories. The Jewish Antifascist Committee prepared the Black Book on the Holocaust on Soviet soil.
