Collection of Ilya Ehrenburg, author and member of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee (JAC), 1941-1967

lya Ehrenburg was born into a Jewish family in Kiev in 1891. He was exiled to France in 1908 after being arrested for his activities against the Czarist regime.
In Paris, he gradually dissociated himself from the Bolsheviks, associating himself with modern artists, publishing his poems and working at translation.
After the Socialist revolution in 1917, he returned to his native country.
From 1923 Ehrenburg worked as a journalist for the "Izvestia" newspaper. The Soviet authorities used his talents as a publicist and his abilities as a propagandist to create an attractive image of Stalin's regime outside of the Soviet Union. Ehrenburg visited Spain during the Spanish Civil War, returning from Spain and France to the Soviet Union in 1940. In 1942 he was appointed to serve on the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee. He collected documentation regarding the Holocaust, and even published material about it. Ehrenburg coined the slogan "Kill the German" in order to arouse hatred for the Germans who were murdering his people. Over the course of the Great Patriotic War (World War II) he served as a journalist for the "Krasnaya zvezda" and other newspapers, as well as a writer for the Sovinformbyuro (Soviet Information Bureau). Adolf Hitler personally gave the order to catch Ilya Ehrenburg and execute him; Nazi propaganda termed Ehrenburg "Stalin's Court Jew". Towards the end of the war, following the publication of Ehrenburg's article "Enough", which expressed doubts regarding the desire of the Allies to bring the Nazis to trial, the head of the Communist Party Propaganda Department, in April 1945, published an article in the "Pravda" newspaper charging Ehrenburg with being too simplistic. Together with Vasily Grossman, Ehrenburg wrote the "Black Book" regarding the annihilation of the Jews within the area of the Soviet Union during the Nazi occupation. The collection of letters which he used during the preparation of "The Black Book" was submitted by his daughter to Yad Vashem. Ilya Ehrenburg died in Moscow in 1967.