Latvian and Estonian Jews bemoan the fact that their story has been overlooked in the annals of Holocaust history.
By JON IMMANUELmass grave Latvia_521(photo credit: Jon Immanuel)
On December 10, Latvian and Estonian Jews in Israel commemorate the almost total destruction of the two Baltic countries’ Jewish communities 69 years ago, an event which in Nazi terms was a complete success, encountering little known resistance. Even the famous words attributed to historian Simon Dubnow, who was among the victims, to “write down and record” what Germans were doing might only be fabricated legend.As one of the first large communities to be obliterated, in 1941, it took years before the exact location of the massacre of 25,000 Jews in Riga could be identified, as their remains were dug up, burned, ground into powder and plowed into the earth in 1943. Only through patient laboratory analysis was soil in the forest eventually found to contain their remains.Riga, the capital of a small Baltic country in search of a national identity, is famous for its international architecture. The medieval charm of its Hanseatic guilds, the fin-de-siecle eccentricity of Jugendstil and the brutality of postwar Soviet gothic also testify to the domination of powerful neighbors that suppressed any aspiration to independence. Ironically, what may be termed indigenous Latvian architecture is best preserved in the wooden dwellings of the Jewish ghetto in what is called the Maskavas, or Moscow quarter, empty now but for memories that a newly independent Latvia would rather forget.One of the few things on which the Soviet occupiers and Latvian nationalists could agree after the war was that there was no need to commemorate separately what Germans did to Latvia’s Jews, because to Stalin, Jews were simply victims of German fascism; and to the Letts, Jews were simply partners of Soviet oppression and got what many deserved.But independence in 1991 and membership in the European Union brought with it an obligation to remember.Latvians first won independence in 1918. They lost it to Stalin in 1940. To many, three years of Nazi occupation between 1941 and 1944 bear no resemblance to the horror of nearly half a century of Soviet rule or even to the one year before the German invasion.This was brought home to me vividly by a plaque referring to the genocide at the Skirotava train station outside Riga where German, Austrian and Czech Jews disembarked from trains bringing them to the ghetto and then death. The memorial made no mention of Jews or of Nazis but bewailed another genocide, that of tens of thousands of Latvians who were deported from there to Russia between 1940 and 1991. The arrival of the Germans ended deportations to Russia.Ephraim Zuroff, the Simon Wiesenthal Center’s Jerusalem director, calls this “the theory of two genocides… two false unholy symmetries in which the relatively few crimes of Jewish communists were presented as the rationale for participation in the Holocaust.” He was referring to Lithuanians, but facing up to the Nazi interlude has not been easy for proud Latvians who don’t want their national identity besmirched by its horrors.The Nazi occupation killed Jews in Latvia perhaps faster and more thoroughly than anywhere else. In that country, where up to 100,000 Jews had lived before World War I and 67,000 Jews still lived when the Red Army was expelled in July 1941, barely 3,000 remained by mid-December of that year, and 300 were there at the war’s end. For 30,000 Jews in smaller Latvian towns, disaster struck in the very first days of German occupation, in pogroms aided and even initiated by hundreds of Latvian collaborators and silently supported by many more.Friedrich Jeckeln, the architect of several mass killings in 1941 including Babi Yar (33,771 Jews near Kiev in September), was sent to Riga to murder most of its 29,602 ghettoized Jews in the Rumbula Forest, a few miles from the center of town and even closer to the Skirotava station. He organized the victims into two groups, killing them a week apart on November 30 and December 8. Funneled into a shady glade where they undressed and were packed into pits like sardines (the comical German description), no more than one bullet was wasted per head. The quartermaster’s inventory showed that only 22,000 bullets were used because many died by being smothered under other bodies; hundreds were shot in the ghetto, some on the way to the pits.After December 8, some 4,000 Latvian Jews remained in a work camp, and some 8,000 foreign Jews replaced those who were dead. Depleted by beating, starvation or disease, survivors were moved to another work camp in the Kaiserwald suburb in 1943, where many more died. Survivors of this camp were transferred to Stutthof near Danzig, then to a sub-camp of Buchenwald in Germany as the Red Army came ever closer to Germany’s prewar borders.LITTLE MORE can be said about the murder of Riga’s Jews without multiplying the horror. No uprising appears to have disturbed the Nazi machine, which operated more smoothly than even Jeckeln had anticipated. In the postwar trial that preceded his execution in Soviet-occupied Riga, he said this was largely thanks to the enthusiasm of Latvian guards. Only three Jews survived, each with an incredible but exceptional story.Most evidence of what happened to everyone else comes from Germans on trial. A policeman observed that when Riga’s ghetto was emptied, “people wept and were full of sorrow. Children screamed.” But after reaching Rumbula, Richard Rehburg, the regional commander of the German rural police, recalled: “It was distressing to see how calmly these people went to their deaths.” One mother, however, protested at the last moment on behalf of her embarrassed son. “He’s a doctor, surely you need doctors,” she beseeched an SS officer.There was one slight hiccup. On November 30, 1941, as 10,500 Jews were being marched to Rumbula, Heinrich Himmler phoned his deputy Reinhard Heydrich to tell him that 1,000 Berlin Jews being transported to Riga that day were to be housed in the ghetto houses vacated by the Latvian Jews. The order, however, arrived too late. Jeckeln did not feel he could march German Jews into Riga from the Skirotava train station when Riga’s Jews were being marched past it in the other direction, so he did what efficiency called for; he marched them a short distance to the pits prepared for Riga’s Jews and shot them before the Riga Jews arrived.Thus Riga became known as the first killing center of Jews deported from Germany. It was the only time Himmler was recorded as being angry that Jews had been killed.Selected to disappear quickly to make room for those German Jews whom many Nazis were not yet psychologically ready to kill, Latvian Jewry was extinguished before the Holocaust had officially begun. The infamous Wannsee Conference at which Heydrich and Adolf Eichmann would spell out Nazi plans for the “final solution” was convened six weeks later.Despite a plentiful supply of schnapps to steel their nerves, this business was thus new to many German troops, too. They were particularly rattled when their first victims were well-dressed Berlin families who came with their suitcases straight off a passenger train and, in familiar accents, asked SS officers what was supposed to happen to them. That bureaucratic error provoked a protest from a senior SS officer that Germans should not be expected to treat “humans who come from our own cultural circle” in the same way as the “indigenous bestial hordes” to be found in Riga.This remark alarmed Nazi officialdom and would offend Latvian Jews, most of whom considered themselves to be culturally German, though they had long been under the rule of the czars. Now they were made to feel more Ostjuden than the Ostjuden. To this day, this thought generates feelings of resentment by Latvian Jews towards German Jews, a symptom, it seems, of victim psychology that is not theirs alone.The death camps revealed at the Wannsee Conference in January 1942 were thus warmly endorsed by the one regional security chief to participate in it – Latvia’s Rudolf Lange, who had warned that the mass shooting in Riga was causing demoralization.There were few heroes in this saga. The chief one was a gentile. Among the handful of survivors who remained in Riga, from 40 to 54 are said to have been hidden by Janis Lipke, a dockworker who applied to work for the Germans with a network of assistants in order to spirit people out of the Riga work camp to a cellar he built under his home. His heroism would become a legend among Latvian Jews starved for light in the darkness. Still, most of those he saved were eventually tracked down and killed.Latvians, too, are waking up to what he can do for their national image. A former prime minister is behind the idea of turning Lipke’s home into a museum and transforming him into an authentic national hero, not merely a Jew-lover and communist whose daughter ran away to join the Soviet army and help Stalin reoccupy the country.Though Latvia was occupied, Latvians were considered inferior ost-nordics rather than Slavs, and many were conscripted into the Waffen SS and sent to various death camps abroad, as well as to the Russian front. In their defense, veterans say Germany, which had liberated them from Stalin, promised postwar independence and they joined only to prevent the return of Soviet occupation, a freedom fighter claim behind which several Latvian and Lithuanian war crimes suspects have successfully sought protection from their Jewish accusers, like Zuroff.Unlike largely Catholic Lithuania, Latvia consisted of a multitude of Protestant religious sects and did not have a long history of Jew-baiting. Bolshevism did it for them. Latvians did not realize that Hitler had connived with Stalin in 1939 to let him have the Baltic states, which he was permitted by secret protocol to occupy only a year later. The presence of Jews in the NKVD, Stalin’s secret police, unimaginable in Latvian or German police forces, made it easier for them to swallow Nazi propaganda printed in the Nazi Party’s Latvian-language mouthpiece Teviya (Fatherland) that Jews were the architects and agents of Bolshevism and Germany was their liberator, especially since two weeks before Germany marched into Riga, the NKVD deported 15,000 Latvians in cattle cars to Soviet Asia (including women, children and more than 3,000 fortunate Jews).LATVIAN JEWS complain that their horror story is neglected by Israel’s media during the annual commemoration of the Holocaust, while the sufferings of Jews in neighboring Lithuania get far more exposure. In truth their stories are similar, but Lithuania had twice as many Jews; and what makes the Lithuanian story more compelling is that a substantial number of Litvaks survived long enough to rebel, to survive and to bear witness.In the case of Latvia, however, the story has been put together more by historians than by eyewitnesses or by eyewitnesses who report more than they saw.For example, on Shabbat eve July 4, 1941, three days after occupying Riga, the Germans told Latvian police to bring gasoline to the Great Chorale Synagogue on Gogol Street. They burned it down along with the Stabu Street synagogue and two other houses of worship. One of the Latvian ringleaders was said to be Herberts Cukurs, a former air ace who flew a homemade plane from Riga to Tokyo and was as much a national symbol in his country as Charles Lindbergh was in his.About 300 Jewish refugees who had fled to Riga from Lithuania were said to have been in the basement at the time, but no one knows their names or how many died. About 30 more worshipers were in the Stabu Street synagogue.Commentators are divided by nationality over these events. Bernard Press, a Jewish writer, says that Latvian police pulled local Jews out of nearby homes and locked them into the doomed building along with the refugees, shooting along with Cukurs at anyone who tried to escape through the windows. Andrew Ezergailis, a Latvian historian, denies that any people were inside the synagogues, since a curfew was in force and no one was seen to escape through its many windows. He downplays the extent of Latvian collaboration to “a few hundred” and doubts that Cukurs, then 42, played as prominent a role as others assert, who place him at almost every significant murder site, including a hospital where he is alleged to have smashed the head of a newborn baby against the wall. A recent German account mostly supports the Jewish version of the synagogue burnings.It is on July 4, US Independence Day, with the US ambassador in attendance, that Latvia officially commemorates the Holocaust of its Jews. The national flag flies from most public and pri-vate buildings with black ribbons attached. The president attends the memorial at the site of the Gogol Shul and lays wreaths at the small black stone commemorating Jews and the large white monument commemorating Lipke and 250 other Righteous among the Nations, of whom 120 have been recognized by Yad Vashem.This has pleased Israeli Jews of Latvian origin but has not diminished their sense that their own suffering as a community is not honored in Israel.“Very few articles, documentaries or interviews are devoted to Latvian Jewry on Holocaust Remembrance Day. They discriminate against us but talk always a lot about Lithuanian, German and Polish Jews,” complains Miryam Yankelowich, a chemist who was born in Latvia after the war, immigrated to Israel in 1974 and has frequently returned to research the bitter fate of her extended family. She owes her own life to her father’s escape on the last train out of Soviet-occupied Riga.A senior Yad Vashem archivist denies such discrimination but says that in comparison even with Lithuania today, Latvia is reluctant to respond to calls for information relating to the Holocaust, so not much is known about the fate of Latvian Jewry. Still, it is surprising that Martin Gilbert’s Atlas of the Holocaust includes a map of Jewish cultural life in Europe that blanks out Latvia. And if that is an accurate assessment of Latvia’s Jewish heritage, surely another Gilbert map that blanks out Riga as an execution site is not.Zuroff dismisses Latvian Jewry’s claim to have suffered the highest “kill rate” in the Holocaust. Lithuania, with twice as many Jews, he says, suffered a kill rate of 96.4 percent compared to 95.7% in Latvia, taking into account the survival of 3,000 Latvian Jews deported to Germany. But that number is disputed by Marger Vestermanis, curator of the Jewish Museum in Riga, who says that only 1,000 Latvian Jews survived deportation to Germany.In any case, maintains Zuroff, even if a higher proportion of Latvian Jews were killed, “Latvian Jews are cultural Litvaks,” an assertion that Latvians indignantly reject. “It is simply not true,” says Paul Maurer, a young Jerusalem librarian from Riga. “You might as well call Litvaks Poles,” says Yankelowich. Not surprisingly, Zuroff defines himself as a New York-born Litvak.A major reason for Latvian Jews’ resentment probably has nothing to do with macabre Holocaust arithmetic but with something far more troubling. They cannot alleviate their pain with any tales of noble resistance as other communities can. By December 1941, before even the Nazis themselves had formally embarked on the “final solution,” almost all Latvian Jews were dead. Just 3,500 were alive, according to Adolf Eichmann’s protocol at the Wannsee Conference, compared with 10 times as many in Lithuania. At that point, four million were still alive in Poland and the Ukraine. Latvia’s northern Baltic neighbor Estonia alone was declared judenfrei because 75% of its 4,000 Jews had fled in time, and the 1,000 who hadn’t could be disposed of in a couple of hours. All remaining Riga Jews were sealed in the work camp.RESISTANCE ANYWHERE was unheard of in 1941. Not until 1942 did a Lithuanian Jewish partisan group operate in the forest around Vilna, invigorated to act as Nazi policy became clear in that year.Poland’s Lachwa ghetto, established in the same month as Riga’s ghetto, was the first to revolt, but only in September 1942, three years after the occupation of Poland, when rumors of death camps were rife. In the breakout, 1,000 Jews fled. Most were caught, and 90 survived the war to share their tales of courage and desperation when they came to Israel. Not until 1943 did the Warsaw Ghetto fight back, and then only after being reduced from 450,000 to 50,000 residents. Though thousands died, some hundreds only had weapons with which to fight.Holocaust Remembrance Day is devoted to martyrs and heroes, with the emphasis on heroic even if passive resistance, but sadly Riga can supply only martyrs, which is particularly galling to Latvian Jews who considered themselves to be a bastion of muscular Zionist activity before the war, while Vilna, the Jerusalem of Lithuania, as Latvian Jews would concede, was where they continued their higher religious education.Latvian Jews were more modern, more German, more Hebraic and perhaps more intellectually contentious than Lithuanian Jews. Yeshayahu Leibowitz, the scourge of Israel’s Gush Emunim settlement movement, and Palestine’s first chief rabbi, Abraham Isaac Kook, the spiritual mentor of Gush Emunim, were both Latvian Jews. Vladimir Jabotinsky, the militant revisionist who established the Betar youth movement in Riga in 1923, was criticized there for not being militant enough. Even Isaiah Berlin, Oxford University’s Riga-born liberal philosopher, was deeply involved in Zionist polemics. Proudly related to Yitzhak Sadeh, the pre-1948 commander of the Palmah, in 1997 from his deathbed he urged Israel to make territorial compromises for peace.Simon Dubnow, the 81-year-old historian who advocated local national autonomy for Jews in Europe rather than Zionism, lived in Riga from 1933 and became Latvian Jewry’s best known icon when he supposedly exhorted Jews around him to “write and record” what was happening, shortly before he was apparently shot on the way to Rumbula on December 8. If the pen is mightier than the sword, his was a call to rebellion of sorts.Jehuda Feitelson, then 18 and now a retired Hebrew University chemistry professor, did not hear the message but recorded his recollections in a 52-page memoir. Through a tiny window in a work camp next door to the larger ghetto, he saw people being marched away on November 30. No one resisted. Whoever could not walk fast enough “was shot on the spot by the Nazi guards.” And when the column had left, “we were told to gather the dead and bring them to the old Jewish cemetery” (subsequently destroyed and turned into a public path by the Soviet Union). Feitelson used his temporary access to the large ghetto to seek out his parents. They were still there. Eight days later, they were in the second group of about 15,000 Jews herded toward the forest.IT HAS often been asked: Didn’t the second group on December 8 know what was in store when the first group on November 30 didn’t return? How could so many thousands accompanied by a few guards go to their fate passively, knowing what had befallen the others?Feitelson explains that they heard that the first group had been sent to a camp in Lithuania. “We seized upon these rumors whose origins were unclear. The truth became clear more than a year later.” That was when Latvians sold personal documents found at the execution site to the Jews remaining in the work camp.The Jews in Latvia, an account by the local Association of Latvian and Estonian Jews, says that in 1943 resistance was planned in Riga’s work camp where Feitelson lived. Arms were smuggled in but because of “loose talk,” the guns were discovered and the entire Jewish police force was subsequently shot. No witnesses to this planned police uprising remained. It thus may be only a false rumor itself. And is “loose talk” a euphemism for betrayal? Feitelson knew nothing of it. Thus passed Latvian Jewry’s last opportunity for resistance before the camp was disbanded.The Latvian Jews’ sense of being shunned is aggravated by the preference Lithuanian Jews in Israel have for maintaining their own national association despite the common roots that Zuroff says they share.WHY THIS is so is hard to pinpoint. In London there is an Association of Baltic Jews, but Lithuanian Jews here do not think they shared a common fate. Some accounts put the number of Litvak resistance fighters in 1942 at nearly 20% of those who were still alive. Abba Kovner, admired as a leader of the Vilna partisans who won additional renown as a kibbutz poet and led an attempt to poison SS officers in a postwar detention camp, was clearly one of them. He cruelly shared political philosopher Hannah Arendt’s contempt for those who did not resist. Arendt especially blamed the Jewish police for causing Jews to participate in their own destruction. Thus one can see why Latvian Jews attach such importance to the rumor of a foiled police rebellion in Riga.Kovner’s assessment of his fellow Jews and, by strong implication, Latvian Jews who as a community did not or could not save themselves, is therefore downright demeaning. In 1963, shortly after the capture, trial and execution in Israel of Eichmann, which elicited Arendt’s comment about the “banality of evil,” Kovner wrote about the banality of the victims. “We shall not bestow the title ‘hero’ on those who were exterminated in the slaughter pit. We, unlike others, shall not reserve a place for them in the Temple of Heroism. We dare not even say they died a martyr’s death.” Kovner is a Zionist icon. No wonder Latvian Jews in Israel feel they do not get their due on Holocaust and Heroism Remembrance Day and resent the Lithuanian Jews who do.Perhaps it was to even the score a little that the ex- Mossad chief Isser Harel, who spent his school years in Latvia, inspired a hit team to go to South America in 1965 in the wake of his Eichmann success. Harel was considered obsessive in his pursuit of German rocket scientists in Egypt and had been required to resign in 1963. The purpose of the assassination team, a member said, was reportedly to dissuade the West German authorities from placing a statute of limitations on Nazi war crimes then being discussed in the Bundestag.Maybe so, but the choice of target, a little-known collaborator, is instructive. Leaving a note on his chest on which was inscribed “From those who never forget” and listing his crimes, the team shot the strapping Herberts Cukurs in a convoluted sting operation that began in Brazil and ended in Uruguay.Because he was never tried and convicted, Cukurs, a prewar national hero, is still highly regarded by many in Latvia, especially in his hometown of Liepaija, where 7,000 Jews were among the first to be murdered in 1941. In 2005 his fellow citizens there commemorated his life with an exhibition. They called it “Presumed Innocent.”Today, some 20,000 Jews live in Latvia, most of them from the postwar Soviet Union when immigration of Russians was encouraged. Soviet immigration reduced the Latvian population from 75% to 58%.
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