As promised, here is my report on my day in Liepaja. After this, I'll write up my visit to Tartu, Estonia, at the international Society of Biblical Literature conference, which is wrapping up tomorrow. On Friday, I'm flying to Copenhagen for two days, which I intend to spend going to museums and enjoying myself, and then on Monday, I'm going back to Ithaca, at long last.
My visit to Liepaja occurred largely because Ieva Gundare, my guide, urged me to do it after I had written her about my family in Liepaja. I’m very grateful that she hired the driver and the other guide (in Liepaja), came to Liepaja with me, and translated what Sandra, the other guide, said in Latvian. Ieva also generously made sandwiches and brought fruit to eat for all of us.
The day began when she came to my hotel in Riga, and we drove to Liepaja, about a two hour drive from Riga. About a half an hour before we arrived in Liepaja, we passed by a large wind farm – many wind turbines turning in the wind.
From
Liepaja, July 22, 2010When we came into Liepaja, we went to a hotel in the center of the city and met the local guide, Sandra. The first place we drove to was the Skede dunes, about fifteen miles/kilometers north of the city along the Baltic sea. This is the place where the Nazis killed thousands of people, Jews, Latvians, and Soviet prisoners of war. It is likely where Dobra Falkon, the wife of Mottel-Mordchai Falkon, my great-great uncle, was killed with thousands of other Jews in mid-December 1941.
There are two memorials at Skede – one set up by the Soviets, which says that 19,000 people were killed there (it does not mention Jews specifically at all), and another recently built by the local Liepaja Jewish community, with support from the Latvian government and groups in Latvia, Israel, and the U.S. This memorial repeats the assertion that 19,000 people were killed at Skede, but this figure is incorrect – it’s much too large. Edward Anders and Vladimir Bans erected a plaque nearby (in Russian, Latvian, and English) that more accurately states who was killed at Skede.
 | Memorial site for victims of Nazi occupation.
Here in the Skede dunes were murdered from 1941 to 1945
3640 Jews, including 1048 children
~ 2000 Soviet prisoners of war
~ Latvian civilians
including people who helped Jews and prisoners, and resisted the occupiers.
We honor the memory of our relatives and all other victims who lie here.
UNITED IN DEATH.
Donated by Liepaja Jews
Edward Anders and Vladimirs Bans |
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| From Liepaja, July 22, 2010 |
Anders and Bans put up this plaque because the other one only mentions Jewish victims of the Nazi murderers, at the insistence of the local Jewish organizers of the memorial. Anders and Bans felt that it was important to honor and remember all who were killed there, Jews and non-Jews. Anders wrote, “We and many fellow Liepaja Jews do not understand the mentality of people who refuse to honor non-Jewish victims—including rescuers of Jews and Soviet POWs—who opposed the Nazis and were killed by them.” I cannot help but think that this division, and the refusal to acknowledge the suffering and deaths of those who together with Jews opposed the Nazis, is another sign of the persistence of the hatred that the Nazis sowed in this part of the world.
The memorial at Skede is built in the shape of a giant menorah. At the entrance there are two big triangular plaques, one with a biblical verse on it, the other acknowledging all those who made the memorial possible. At the end of each branch of the menorah, next to the dunes, is a stone with another verse engraved on it (seven in all). The following two photographs are of the introductory plaques.
The biblical verse is from the book of Lamentations 1:12 – “May it not come upon you, all who pass on the way; look and see if there is any pain like my pain which is done to me!”
The next pictures are of the dunes and the sea. It is a lonely spot. The last sight for those who were killed here was of the sea.
 | | This is one of the stone pillars with biblical verses at the ends of the menorah branches. It is inscribed with a verse from Lamentations 3:19 – “Remember my suffering and my oppression, gall and wormwood.” |
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| From Liepaja, July 22, 2010 |
The next place we went to was inside Liepaja, at another location where Jews were murdered during July 1941 – near a lighthouse that is currently inside an army camp. There is a memorial plaque on a wall outside in Latvian and Russian, underneath an older Soviet memorial that doesn’t mention Jews. I’ve tried to translate the Latvian via Google translate, so it’s not exact:
Stop people! [addressed to passersby]
At this place on July 27, 1941 in Liepaja
fascist murders took place during the Jewish Holocaust
It’s possible that my great-great uncle, Mottel-Morchai Falkon, was killed here in July 1941. The list of victims of the Nazis in Liepeja that Edward Anders and his colleagues have drawn up from many sources lists his death as occurring in July. The killings began almost as soon as the Germans entered Liepaja, on June 29. The first killings at the lighthouse occurred on July 7.
We next drove to the Jewish cemetery in Liepaja, which is still largely intact. Ieva said that this was the largest still existing Jewish cemetery in Latvia – when she saw it for the first time she was very surprised by its size. The graves and tombstones there are for people who died up until 1941. The first victims of the Nazis were buried in a mass grave at the cemetery (I did not see this), but afterwards they were buried where they were killed.
In the late 1990s Edward Anders and his colleagues began to work on assembling the names of Liepaja Jews who were living in the city before 1940, and discovering their fates under the Soviet and Nazi occupations. They came up with a list of more than 7,000 Jews who had died at the hands of the Nazis or the Soviets. (The Soviets invaded Latvia on June 17, 1940, and on June 14, 1941, they deported thousands of people from the three Baltic states of Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia to the Gulag camps or to Siberia; 208 of these were Jews from Liepaja. The Nazis invaded the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941 – this included the three Baltic states, which were among the first locations to be overrun by the German armies. The first German killing squad arrived in Liepaja on June 29, 1941 – from Einsatzgruppe A. The Einsatzgruppen followed close behind the German armies invading the Soviet Union, and were responsible for killing about one million Jews).
In 2004 a memorial wall to the murdered Liepaja Jews was erected in the Jewish cemetery, listing the names of all the Jewish victims, those brave people who rescued Jews (33 Jews survived in Liepaja itself because they were protected by non-Jews), and the names of the donors. The wall was renewed in a more durable form in 2008.
The section of the wall with the names of my relatives, listing their names and ages at death, is on the next page: three generations of the family. Dobra and Mottel-Mordchai were in their early 70s, their son Abram was 47, and his two children Betja and Genia were 18 and 19 years old.
 | | Names of the rescuers of Jews. Robert and Johanna Seduls saved eleven Jews by hiding them in their basement. |
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| From Liepaja, July 22, 2010 |
We then walked around the cemetery for about a half an hour, looking at the headstones of people who had been buried there. I took some photos of the headstones, which I will post later on my blog. I’ve copied the Hebrew and translated it – some of the epitaphs are quite moving, indicating the love that the family had for the person who died. The memorial to the Jews who died in the Holocaust is the only demonstration of their descendants and relatives that they are also fondly remembered.
Our next and last stop was the part of Liepaja where the Nazis established a ghetto. 832 Jews who remained alive in Liepaja on July 1, 1942 were forced into a ghetto of one block. One of the streets bounding the ghetto was Barenu iela [street] – and my great-great uncle Mottel-Mordchai lived at 19 Barenu iela. It turned out that his house was not included in the ghetto area, but it was not very far away. We drove Barenu iela and past the ghetto area. It seemed that most of the houses there had probably been there in the 1940s – they were old wooden houses, not the new housing built by the Soviets in the newer parts of the city.
When we came to the probable location of his house, there was nothing there – only the foundation and some of the wooden floor. According to Sandra, the house had been standing up until three years before, and then was torn down because it was in such bad shape. I have photographs of the house foundation and other houses on the street.
Notice the apartment building behind the foundations – it’s from the Soviet period.
The next few buildings are from Barenu iela.
16 Barenu iela.
20 Barenu iela.
16 Barenu iela.
It was strange to stand on the same street I know that my relatives lived on, so many years ago. If they had survived the Nazi extermination, maybe there would still be members of the family living in this house, or in the city of Liepaja.
I never thought I would ever visit Liepaja - I was afraid of how I would feel, that it would simply be too emotionally overwhelming to be there. What I found, however, was that although I felt emotional at times - sadness, especially at the Skede beach, and anger at the Nazis for their vicious crimes, especially when I was at the Rumbula massacre site in Riga - the passage of time made the events of that time seem simply too far away. I think I also had the idea, somehow, that going to the place where these events happened, where the Nazis had committed their murders, would enable me to understand them better.
But instead I had the same feeling that I had in the fall of 2001 when I went to the site of the World Trade Center after the terrorist attacks - blank incomprehension. On the emotional level, I simply still do not understand how people could do these things, how they could kill innocent people in the street, how they could round them up and kill them in a public park, how they could assemble them together and drive them in trucks to the beach and shoot them at the edge of a enormous pit.
Why did the murderers not become revolted by what they were doing and simply stop? I've read theories of how soldiers can become indoctrinated to believe there is nothing wrong with killing other people in war, and that this brutalization can then be exploited so that they are willing to kill civilians (Christopher Browning has written about this). But when I picture a soldier faced with a woman or child, somebody who is clearly not a combatant, it is very hard for me to understand how he could imagine that it is permitted to kill them. Wouldn't he think of his own family - his mother or sister, or wife, or his own children?
I obviously do not have the answers to these questions. Maybe there are others who do, but I am still left with the blank incomprehension.
I just spent the day visiting museums in Copenhagen, including the ruins underneath the Christansborg castle, the Jewish museum, and the National Museum. At the last museum, I headed up to the third floor to see the Egyptian and classical galleries, and found some attractive displays. There were some charming little cat statues in one of the Egyptian galleries, dedicated to the goddess Bastet.
