Edwin Black is an American syndicated columnist and journalist. He specializes in human rights, the historical interplay between economics and politics in the Middle East, petroleum policy, the abuses practiced by corporations, and the financial underpinnings of Nazi Germany. Black is the son of Polish Jews who were survivors of the Holocaust. His mother, Ethel "Edjya" Katz, hailed from Białystok, and had only managed to survive the Holocaust when as a 13-year old in August 1943 she was pushed to safety by her mother and other prisoners through the vent of a boxcar en route to the Treblinka extermination camp. She was subsequently shot by militiamen and left for dead in a shallow grave, from which she was pulled to safety. Black's father had escaped his own murder by successfully fleeing to the woods from a long march to an isolated "shooting pit" and had subsequently fought the fascists as a Betar partisan. The pair had survived World War II by hiding in the forests of Poland for two. …