The Holocaust in the East: Local Perpetrators and Soviet ResponsesSilence has many causes: shame, embarrassment, ignorance, a desire to protect. The silence that has surrounded the atrocities committed against the Jewish population of Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union during World War II is particularly remarkable given the scholarly and popular interest in the war. It, too, has many causes of which antisemitism, the most striking, is only one. When, on July 10, 1941, in the wake of the German invasion of the