In Europe (29 page)

There is one issue, though, that the catalogue barely touches on: the zealous support the Germans received in Latvia and Lithuania for their persecution of the Jews. That morbid zeal had everything to do with the violent cycle of revolution and counter-revolution in which people had been caught up here for decades. The Jewish citizenry – some of them communists, others capitalists – were the ideal scapegoats. In essence, the pattern seen in Vienna was repeated here. ‘The Jew spoke German and was on occasion more German than the German,’ writes Modris Eksteins in his impressive personal history of the Baltic States. ‘The Jew spoke Russian and again could be a better spokesman for Russian culture than the Russian. The Jew was a town-dweller, a cosmopolitan. The Jew was all things – but to many Latvians, caught up in the mood of growing paranoia and crude nationalism, he represented all things foreign, all things dangerous.’

As soon as the Soviets withdrew in summer 1941, therefore, the population of Latvia and Lithuania turned on the Jews. The museum catalogue, published last year, speaks only of Latvian ‘Self-Defence Troops’ who ‘closed battle with retreating Soviet units’ and with ‘those who supported Soviet rule’. ‘They killed approximately 6,000 Soviet party activists of various nationalities and origins: Latvians, Russians and Jews.’

But what really happened? On 29 June, 1941, even before the Gestapo and the
Einsatzkommandos
had arrived, all Jewish males between the ages of sixteen and fifty were rounded up on the market square in the Latvian town of Daugavpils. More than 1,000 of them were killed right there by the Latvians themselves. All over Riga, on the night of 2 July, Jewish property was looted and Jews were murdered. At noon on 4 July, dozens of Jewish families were driven into the Greise Hor Schul, Riga's biggest synagogue. Approximately 300 Lithuanian-Jewish refugees had also taken refuge in the cellars of the synagogue. Latvian Nazis locked the doors and set the building on fire. Hundreds of Jews were burned alive. A similar atrocity took place at Riga's Old Jewish Cemetery. The catalogue from the Museum of the Occupation mentions none of this. It shows only a photograph of the wooden steeple of St Peter's Church, which burned down during the fitful fighting around Riga in those same days, ‘as did a considerable number of the old city's historic buildings’. To this it adds that the Soviet rulers ignored ‘the exceptional threat to the Jewish population from the National Socialists’. Then, the authors say, the German occupiers tried to use a number of ‘suggestible Latvians’ to terrorise the civilian population.

But, once again: what really happened? The percentage of Latvian Jews who survived the Holocaust is lower than anywhere else in Europe: 1.9 per cent. When the German chaplain Walter S. arrived in the eastern Latvian town of Rezekne on Sunday, 6 July, 1941, the entire population was out on the street for the funeral of twenty-six victims of the Soviet reign of terror. Their communal grave had been found not long before. Walter S. was called in right away to perform the graveside service and read Revelations 21:4 (‘and God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes; and there shall be no more death, neither sorrow, nor crying, neither shall there be any more pain: for the former things are passed away.’)

Immediately after the service, the Latvians began the slaughter. ‘The Jews, who had been pulling the strings all along, were beaten to death wherever they were found,’ the pastor wrote to his wife that evening. ‘They were simply cut down; with a shovel if need be, if that was all there was.’ He saw Jews being driven into the mass grave and shot. He also described how some of them tried to escape into the river and were cut down there by pistol and rifle fire. Chaplain S. would have rather seen the whole thing proceed in a more orderly fashion. ‘That they had to be executed, everyone was in agreement on that. But not this random slaughter.’

Was everyone like this? No. In the Gallery of the Just in a little Jewish museum in Vilnius I saw the portraits of the handful of heroes who braved all dangers to protect and hide Jewish families. The faces were ordinary ones, some pretty, others plump and friendly, but always simple: farmers, woodcutters, railway workers, caring neighbours, honest and brave people. ‘It's strange, but my father never talked much about those horrible days,’ one son wrote.‘Only when he was on his deathbed, wasted by disease, did he suddenly reach out and grasp my mother's hand and shout: “Take our child and run!”’

During the Second World War 70,000 Jews were murdered in Latvia, 30,000 of them by summer 1941. In Lithuania, almost all of the country's 200,000 Jews were killed. (In Estonia there were only 5,000 Jews to start with, and most of them were able to escape to the Soviet Union.) In his official report, one German officer characterised the farmers’ hatred of the Jews as ‘monstrous’. They had, as he wrote on 16 August, 1941, ‘already done a great deal of the dirty work’ before the Germans could intervene.

After mentioning these and other examples, Modris Eksteins correctly observes that the Holocaust was not exclusively a German affair. Hitler may have found ‘willing executioners’ among his own people, but also among the citizens of the lands he conquered.‘The Holocaust was enacted in the fevered dreamscapes of Eastern Europe where right and wrong were seldom on opposite sides, and where fear and hatred were a way of life. This was a frontier land where borders and peoples had fluctuated throughout history, and where the Jew and the Gypsy were symbols
of transience and instability. Holocaust was a state of mind here before it was a Nazi policy.’

During these March days of 1999, the sky remains a clear blue. On the square in front of Riga's cathedral you hear only the footsteps of passers-by, and the sound of a cello. Beside the church a boy is playing Bach. Bach in an old, half-German square, on a peaceful, sunny afternoon.

I have been walking around the city all day with that thin Jewish guidebook in my hand. I try to find the place where the Greise Hor Schul once stood, that grisly spot on the corner of the
Gogola Iela
, Gogol Street. Today it is a city square. A few stones are all that remains. A monument was set up here in 1992 to commemorate all the Jews killed in Latvia. When the ruins of the synagogue were pulled down after the war, the cellars were found still to contain the charred bones and skulls of the victims of 4 July, 1941. With no further ado, the cellars were filled with debris and a little park was built over them, in honour of the ‘Front Line Workers’. It was only in 1988 that a plaque was put up here.

The Old Jewish Cemetery, too, has become a park, the Park of the Communist Brigades. The cemetery wall was torn down, the old gravestones gradually removed or stolen, the graves finally cleared. At Rumbula, the place where the most Jews – approximately 30,000 – were killed in Riga, a marker has been standing since the 1960s for the ‘victims of Nazi terror’. Only since 1989 has the marker clearly indicated that this is a Jewish mass grave.

Riga's little Jewish museum is full of letterheads and advertisements, all signs of Jewish enterprise from the 1930s: Adolf Levi, tailor; Leibovic, photo studio; Schenker & Co, international transport; Rabinovi, building materials; Holländer & Friedländer, art supplies. Beside them hangs an outline map taken from a report by Group A of the
Sicherheitsdienst
, neatly displaying the ‘production totals’ for autumn 1941. Lithuania: 136,421, with 19,500 still left in the ghetto. Latvia: 35,238, with 25,000 still in the ghetto. Estonia: 963, and the proud note ‘
Judenfrei
’. Beside all these figures is drawn a neat little coffin, the way civil servants in their reports might draw a house, or a tree, or a little stick figure. Everyone who saw this report in early 1942, in other words, could clearly see that the ‘Jewish
problem’ was not being ‘solved’, but that the murdering was going on in the tens of thousands.

The museum also contains the famous photographs of Jewish women shivering in their underwear, four women and a girl huddled together against the cold and the shame. Pathetic bloomers. Defenceless nakedness. In the next photograph, other people are undressing. Now there is a boy among them, fourteen or fifteen years old, he's out in front, hands in his pockets. Then we see the group standing at the edge of a dune. In the last one they are tumbling down, amid all the other bodies. Beside it hangs an enlarged photograph of the boy. Now I can see the expression on his face. Great fear, his mouth wide open.

We know the names of the teenage girl who is brushing back her hair shyly with one hand, her head tilted to one side, and the woman with whom she is standing arm in arm. They are Rosa Purve and her mother, both factory workers.

All of the pictures were taken in the dunes right behind this city. On 15 December, 1941, 2,700 men, women and children were killed by the SS and Latvian guards. Long after the war was over the skulls continued to wash up on the beach: many of the Jews were first driven into the sea, and then killed. Years later a German sailor testified that a great many Latvian regulars had come to watch as well: ‘Come on men, they're going to shoot some Jews!’

I strike up a conversation with the museum's director, Marger Vestermanis, a man whose face is lined and wrinkled with age. ‘Here everything is always denied. If a German soldier had not happened to take a couple of pictures, the massacre in the dunes would never have taken place. That fire in the synagogue: there are still people who claim there was no one in the building. But we have the personal details of the people who were in it, we have eyewitnesses, everything.’

In 1941, Marger Vestermanis was living in Riga too. Back then he was the same age as the boy in the picture, but he does not want to talk about his own experiences. ‘I'd rather talk about our research, and about the differences between Latvia and a country like the Netherlands.’ He starts telling me about the continuous conflicts and the crisis in which the Baltic States were trapped from the early years of the twentieth century. Before the Second World War, he emphasises, there was no rabid anti-Semitism
here. ‘There was only an incredible amount of aggression in the air. That's the big difference with the Netherlands. Here there were new regimes all the time, people had to reorient themselves politically all the time. And then suddenly there was the Nazi era: time for the great internal settling of accounts. Between Latvians, too. Who had actually helped the Russians to draft their deportation lists? Who were the communists? During the first six months of the German occupation, 120,000 Latvians were arrested and often shot and killed without a trial. When it's so easy for you to mow down your own countrymen, why worry about some foreign ethnic group?’

Later I read that, at the age of fifteen, Vestermanis had become a cabinetmaker. That is how he saved himself. Every morning he and a large group of men wearing yellow stars would walk from the ghetto into town to work for the German Army. The men had to sort clothing for the
Sicherheitspolizei
, mop floors in hospitals, clean the staff offices. Vestermanis repaired furniture for the SS.

When the group came home from work one November evening in 1941, all of the elderly, the women and children, had disappeared from the ghetto. Later it turned out that the entire Jewish community of Riga, 30,000 people in all, had been taken out to the edge of town. There, most of them were shot beside enormous pits.

For the 4,000 surviving
Arbeidsjuden
, a new ghetto – the Little Ghetto – was roped off. The old ghetto was immediately put to use for new groups of Jews brought in from Berlin, Stuttgart, Vienna, Cologne, Prague and other Central European cities. For most of them, Riga was merely a stopping-off point on their way to the end. Vestermanis himself was finally sent on transport to Courland. Farmers sneaked food to him and his comrades by leaving potatoes and bread along the road. After a while he escaped, and in the woods he joined up with a wandering group of German and Latvian deserters.

But he did not want to talk about that.

Back in Vilnius I had had a strange experience. In this city approximately a third of the Jewish population, some 70,000 people in all, had been executed in a park. Paneriai is the name of the park, and it is only a few kilometres outside town. All those families are still lying there, in mass
graves. In my attempts to get there I asked three different taxi drivers, but not one of them had ever heard of the place. Finally I found one who was willing to drive me in that direction.

After a lot of asking and searching, we at last found the spot. It was an echoingly quiet stretch of woods the size of a large campsite, beside some railway tracks. There were hollows and hillocks everywhere, dusted with the last covering of snow. The wind was blowing through the treetops. Otherwise nothing, except for a mangy horse and a little monument. Since 1991 one can read that most of the victims were Jewish – before that, the inscription spoke of ‘Soviet citizens’. The taxi driver walked along with me, visibly moved. ‘The things people do to each other.’ About 200 metres further on were the first dachas, beyond a bungalow park.

In the plane to Berlin I flip through the glossy magazine
Baltic Outlook
. I happen upon an interview with the beautiful Ines Misan, raised in a provincial Latvian town, the child of a perpetually drunken father, today a top fashion model in New York and a welcome guest at official openings and parties thrown by the likes of Madonna, Armani and Versace. ‘I have two identical Mercedes.’

Question: ‘What do you find important?’

Answer: ‘Money. I like being able to give myself whatever I want. That's what I love about America. There, if someone has no money, he's lazy. Or he has no education, or he's an alcoholic or a drug addict. A normal person, a man who loves a woman, knows that she needs all that. American men live with their wives for five or six years, then dump them for a younger woman. That's why I've had so many boyfriends.’

Question: ‘Can you honestly say that you have never used a man?’ Answer: ‘I have, I've done that, more than once. But I didn't do it to be nasty. I married an American because I knew that then I would be allowed to stay in America, but I also liked him a lot. But does the fact that you have a car, money and an apartment in New York mean that you've sold yourself? Sure, girls from the former Soviet Union go out with rich men, but in the end they marry for love and not for money?’