Terrible memories of the Holocaust: “The SS police called it to pack the sardines”
In a forest area around a mile outside Riga, historian Ilja Lenskis shows what became the path until death for about 25,000 Jews, of which 24,000 came from here. Two days at the end of 1941, November 30 and December 8, they were forced to hike a mile in winter cold from Riga’s ghetto, and then undress here in the last uphill in Rumbula.
– People were brought up to pits that were particularly prepared. They were forced to lie down with their faces to the ground to be shot from above by a special German unit. Then more people are loaded on top in a new layer. The head of the SS police called it to pack the sardines, says Ilja Lenskis, museum director at Jews in Latvia.
The life of the relatives ended in mass graves
Ilja himself has relatives whose life ended in the mass graves here. In total, about three -quarters of Latvia’s previously over 90,000 Jews were murdered during the Holocaust. After several later also moved from here, the Jewish population today consists of just over 8,000. Just a tenth as many as then.
– We have not come across the Holocaust. But let’s describe it as we have not stopped developing, says Ilja Lenskis, and goes on to say about the Rumbula massacre.
– The winter between 1941 and 1942 was particularly hard. It was snow and cold. Many books on Riga’s ghetto describe how blood was located everywhere in the snow.
Inside Riga, Dmitry Krupnikov shows around the cobbled streets of the neighborhood that made up the ghetto. He says that an estimated 30 of his relatives were murdered after the Nazis occupied Latvia in July 1941.
“This is a unique place in Europe because it basically still looks in the same way as when it was a ghetto,” says Dmitry Krupnikov, vice chairman of the Jewish Community of Latvia.
Trying to see a meaning
Many were suspended in small rooms inside the houses where they lived under difficult conditions. They had a hard time getting food and was gradually broken down. Krupnikov emphasizes that the Holocaust here was largely carried out with the Bumbula Massacre at the end of the same year, ie before the extinction of Jews in Auschwitz-Birkenau and several other concentration camps even started.
– It’s sad because I never got to meet my relatives. I hardly have any photos either because those who fled from Riga couldn’t bring so many things. And when they returned, their apartments were plundered. Most of what they left was either stolen, ejected or burned, says Dmitry Krupnikov.
In central Riga, the museum shows Jews in Latvia, where Ilja Lenskis is the director, the history of the Jews in the country since the 16th century. The chapter on the Holocaust is told in its own, dark room. Even there, Dmitry and Ilja try to see a sentence.
– It tells us a lot about human nature. There is again reason to research history if we do not try to understand something important about ourselves through it, says Ilja Lenskis.
– We always have to remember how little it was required for the world to be so violent. We really need to try to study and see what all of us normal people can do to prevent this from happening someone else, somewhere in the world, says Dmitry Krupnikov.