This study concerns itself with the way the Jewish press in the free world reported and understood the plight of the Jews in Nazi-occupied Europe.

As I wound up my research, it occurred to me that my investigation began not in libraries in Israel, New York, and London, but much earlier: when the Soviet authorities exiled my family – to its good fortune – to the fringes of Siberia, whence we migrated to Kyrgyzstan in Central Asia.

In the place where we lived in Kyrgyzstan, there was a large sugar factory where most of the refugees who had gathered there worked. On the bulletin board affixed to the factory gate, the official state newspaper, Izvestia, was posted every day. Almost every day on my way home from school, I passed this location to read the headlines that described how the war was progressing. Thus, I became something of a commentator on military affairs, interpreting the battles on the various fronts for my Russian, Polish, and Jewish classmates. As I did my research for this book, I found a similarity between the Russian press from my childhood and the Jewish one that I investigated. It had to do with the blaring headlines that these newspapers regularly devoted to the demarches of the war on the Soviet front: The headlines were almost the same in form. In contrast, the main American and British newspapers that I perused for comparison purposes – The New York Times, The Times of London, and so forth – invested such emphasis only in special developments on the war front.