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Wartime Documents Tell Story of Lost Soviet Communities
(Ha'aretz) Revital Blumenfeld - More than a million new testimonial pages about Jews in the Soviet Union are to be released by Yad Vashem beginning on Holocaust Remembrance Day, in the wake of agreements with the KGB archives and the national archives of Ukraine, Belarus, Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia. "There are many black holes concerning communities and individuals in Central and Eastern Europe, where the majority of Jews lived," says Dr. Haim Gertner, head of the archives division of the Yad Vashem World Center for Holocaust Research, Documentation and Education. The region "includes entire villages that were wiped out by the Nazis in one day, and nobody was left to narrate what happened." Dr. Arkadi Zeltser, head of Yad Vashem's center for the research of Jews of the Soviet Union during the Holocaust, says on the eve of the war some five million Jews lived in the Soviet Union; by the end of the war, some 2.7 million had been murdered.