A host of people helped in big and small ways to bring this book to fruition, but there are two without whom the first word never would have been written. Larisa Volovik and her daughter Yulana Volshonok operate the Kharkov Holocaust Museum where I learned about the historic 1943 trial that history forgot. Had I not happened across an exhibit on the trial during a visit to the museum in 2006, there’s little chance I ever would have known about it.
When I returned to Kharkov in December 2010 to do research for this book, I would have been little more than a sightseer without the help of a small village of friends and strangers. I would have been speechless without my gifted and patient translators—Daria and Victoria Plis, and Anna Kakhnovska. I’m grateful to Mariana Yevsyukova for introducing me to Daria and Victoria, and to her grandmother, Antonina Bogancha, for welcoming me into her home as she did in 2006—the same home where the Bogancha family sheltered my mother and her sister after their escape from the death march to Drobitsky Yar.
Victor Melikhov provided an invaluable seminar on Ukrainian history, telling me things I would not have discovered on my own. Yuri Radchenko took time out from his doctoral studies in Holocaust history to show me the places in and around Kharkov where Jews were jailed, murdered, and buried. Moshe Moskovitz, chief rabbi of Kharkov, shared his own story as a Second Generation survivor and told me what life is like today for Jews in Kharkov.
Irina Ferenzova, the chief guide at the Drobitsky Yar memorial who retrieved my camera from thieves on my visit in 2006, gave me hot tea after my solitary walk through the ravine on a snowy morning—then left her post to get me back to town after my cabbie was a no-show. Gala Dobrovolska, my seatmate on the flight from New York to Ukraine, enlisted her son to drive me to the train station in a snowstorm the night I left Kharkov.
I was welcomed like family at Jewish organizations in Kharkov, and by the students and teachers of School 13, the last school my mother attended before the Nazis arrived in October 1941. An administrator at Kharkov Conservatory dropped everything late in the day to give us a tour. There was no end to the cheerful assistance provided by the young, bilingual staff at the Chichikov Hotel.
Special thanks to friends Alan and Naomi Berger whose book, Second Generation Voices: Reflections by Children of Holocaust Survivors & Perpetrators, helped me better understand the impact of the Holocaust on my own family and the crucial importance of sharing the story with succeeding generations.
I owe a great debt to the readers who came to hear me speak about Hiding in the Spotlight (www.hidinginthespotlight.com) at more than 150 events around the country. Their evident fascination with the history of this overlooked chapter of the Holocaust and a hunger to know more was a major factor in my decision to turn an idea into a manuscript. Once again, as with Hiding in the Spotlight, Pegasus Books publisher Claiborne Hancock took a brave leap in buying the manuscript, and my editor, Jessica Case, provided the go-for-it enthusiasm and astute editorial guidance that made the manuscript all it could be.
Like its predecessor, Judgment Before Nuremberg is animated by the remarkable spirit and words of my mother, Zhanna, who did not hesitate for a moment when I asked her to relive these terrible memories one more time for the benefit of others. And through it all, from inception to fruition, I was sustained and inspired by the love, patience, and creative insights of my wife Candy, who once again helped me push beyond the cold facts of the story to the beating heart.