There are one hundred and sixteen letters in the Ginsburg correspondence, and also many unsorted pages. Some of the letters are long, covering many pages, containing discussion and information, and expressing the writers’ emotions; others are condensed on postcards, where much had to be put on just one small page; there are also telegrams, with the briefest information. All the letters, except for the telegrams, were handwritten in Russian. From this collection, I selected and translated ninety-nine items that seem to best illustrate the themes of the book. Furthermore, some letters have not been translated in their entirety—often I only selected parts of the letters for translation. What guided me in the selection process? The most basic consideration is that the letters are extremely repetitive. One of the main explanations why they sent so many letters, sometimes more than one on the same day, is that the senders were not certain, and justifiably so, that their letters would ever reach the addressee. (The other explanation is probably the repetitive style favored by the authors themselves.) Although it is no doubt important for readers to know that some themes were particularly recurrent in the correspondence, reproducing all the letters would—in my opinion—make the book difficult, if not impossible, to read. In addition, in a small number of cases, it was impossible to identify the author and/or the date of the letters. Basic information about all the letters, including those not translated for the book, can be found in a list of the letters, at the end of the book, before the Bibliography. This information is also present in footnotes scattered throughout the book, in the most appropriate places, chronologically.
The analysis of the letters written by the members of the Ginsburg family constitutes the bulk of this book. I have divided the letters into three parts: those written in 1941, 1942, and 1943. I have tried as far as possible to reconstruct the atmosphere in which the Ginsburgs wrote their letters. To this end, my comments following each letter provide perspective not only on the changing relationships within the family but, most specifically, on the changing course of the War, as it affected the region in which they lived. I have described military developments in the entire North Caucasus, which would have been of significance to the Ginsburgs, if they had known about them in real time, but which they may or may not have learned about from the Soviet media.
To provide a further perspective on the outlook of the Ginsburgs, I have interwoven their correspondence with other contemporary testimonies relating to this period. Although, in many cases, it cannot be established whether the Ginsburgs shared some or all of these views, these documents provide an important additional context. To this effect, I have also cited relevant secondary sources that were published between June 1941 and July 1942 in Rostov-on-Don and other North Caucasian cities to which Jews were evacuated. These sources include the central Soviet newspapers (Pravda and Izvestiya) largely available in Rostov-on-Don, as well the local Soviet newspapers published in the North Caucasus, most specifically the newspaper Molot (Hammer), which was printed in Rostov-on-Don.19
In an attempt to understand how the Ginsburgs’ perception of the events was shaped, I have also included other Soviet sources, indicating whether or not they would have been available to the Ginsburgs. Furthermore, in an attempt to present a relatively accurate appraisal of the strategic situation in the region, I have included contemporary articles from The New York Times and The Washington Post, expanding on the course of the War in the Caucasus. In many cases, these articles present a critical reading of Soviet and German military communiques, a unique and largely forgotten source of information on the course of the War. I recognized their value as a real-time source, even if they were not available to the Ginsburgs. To obtain a real-time update on the military situation in the region), first I had to strip off the layers of propaganda; I have commented on these communiques, as well as on all the other sources cited in the book.
In selecting which sources to include, I have given priority to the local media, assuming that, as a rule, the local population, including members of the Ginsburg family, were primarily interested in the news about their own locality. Furthermore, in many cases, the news from official Soviet newspapers did not reach them. Consequently, I have chosen local news (such as a report concerning fighting in the Rostov theatre) and major news from other sectors (such as a successful Soviet advance in some region other than the southern Soviet-German front). By the same logic, among publications from outside the Caucasus, I have selected only those that were of paramount importance in promoting Jewish awareness of the extensity of the German threat.
Where I have added information in the letters, for clarification purposes, I have used square brackets and italics. The word “Note” has been used where it refers to an official announcement by the Soviet authorities. The word “War,” on its own, has been capitalized whenever it refers to the Soviet-German War. Other references to war, such as “wartime” and “time of war,” are not capitalized.
As regards names, where the married name of the sisters is known (in the case of Anya and Liza), I have given both their married name and maiden name (in parenthesis) throughout chapter 1.1 and the first time that one of them is mentioned in the other chapters, and only used their maiden name (Ginsburg) thereafter. For all three sisters, I have given their formal first names followed by their diminutive names (in parenthesis) throughout chapter 1.1 and the first time that they are mentioned in the other chapters, and only used their diminutive names thereafter. However, where their names are mentioned in the footnotes, I have used “Liza Chazkewitz and Anya Greener,” as their letters to Efim are referenced in this way at Yad Vashem.
1 See, for example, Tat′iana Voronina, “Kak chitat′ pis′ma s fronta? Lichnaia korrespondentsiia i pamiat′ o Vtoroi mirovoi voine,” Neprikosnovennyi zapas 3 (2011): 162.
2 For example: Robert Kindler, “Famines and Political Communication in Stalinism. Possibilities and Limits of the Sayable,” Jahrbücher für Geschichte Osteuropas 62, no. 2 (2014): 255–272.
3 For example, Malte Griesse, Communiquer, juger et agir sous Staline. La personne prise entre ses liens avec les proches et son rapport au système politico-idéologique (Frankfurt a.M. [et al.]: Lang, 2011).
4 In this book, the terms “refugee” and “evacuee” are used interchangeably to denote all those Jews and non-Jews who moved out of the threatened Soviet regions, whether under a government-initiated program or independently, unless stated otherwise. By the same token, the terms “evacuation,” “flight” and “escape” are also used interchangeably to describe the ways in which people moved out of the threatened Soviet regions, whether under a government-initiated program or on their own, unless stated otherwise.
5 Karel C. Berkhoff, Motherland in Danger: Soviet Propaganda during World War II (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012), 134–166.
6 On Soviet newspapers in the 1920s, that is, during the stage framing this perception, see Matthew Lenoe, Closer to the Masses: Stalinist Culture, Social Revolution, and Soviet Newspapers (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004).
7 The emphasis here is on the words “relatively stable” and “some.” This does not mean that political and moral considerations in their deliberations were entirely non-existent. But several hundred testimonies, analyzed in my book (Kiril Feferman, The Holocaust in the Crimea and the North Caucasus [Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 2016]), roughly half of them pertaining to the Caucasus, point to the overwhelming importance of economic factors when the Jews were discussing their motives for evacuation from this region.
8 Anna Shternshis, “Between Life and Death: Why Some Soviet Jews Decided to Leave and Others to Stay in 1941,” Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 15, no. 3 (Summer 2014): 478–479.
9 For example, Mordechai Altshuler, “The Distress of Jews in