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Re my earlier posting about Soviet knowledge of the killing of the Jews I received the following letter from Peter Holquist (Cornell). A. Ezergailis: I can throw some light at least on the question of when, at the very latest, the Soviet leadership knew that Jews were being specifically singled out for slaughter. A report from the Presidential archive, prepared by Savchenko, zam kommissar NKVD Ukr SSR to the CC and dated 4 Dec 1941, "Spetsial'noe soobshchenie o polozhenii v gor. Kieve posle okkupatsii ego protivnikom" (VESTNIK 3 [1995]) declares flat out that "on 28 Sept announcements were hung throughout the city for the entire Jewish population to assemble at the Luk'ianov cemetery. . . . The entire Jewish population, the overwhelming majority of whom were women, old men and children, presented themselves at the appointed place, where they were executed [rasstrelianyy]. . . . Thus, in Kiev up to thirty thousand Jews were executed." Note that the report identifies the victims specifically as Jews; this would of course not be observed after the war. As I told you at our dinner, my colleague Amir Weiner, now at Stanford, is working on the Holocaust in the USSR, and he also notes that very early on the Soviets were aware that the Germans were specifically targeting Jews. Two other small points: first, do you know of Moshe Lewin's autobiographical account of how he escaped the German advance in the Vilius area by illegally hitching a ride in a Red Army truck (the soldiers bundled him and three friends in after a young [molodenkii] officer forbade them to be picked up)? Second, it is indeed interesting to trace when the Soviets knew what was going on, and what sense they made of it. Peter Holquist
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