Memories live on Gogol Street and in the palace
Sandra L. Medearis

RIGA – The houses still stand on Ludzas and Pushkin streets in Riga where Jack Ratz lived as a boy, still inhabited 56 years after Nazis took away his mother and three brothers and killed them. Another brother lost his life in a slave camp.

The synagogue, a few blocks away behind Riga’s central market, is gone, burned on July 4, 1941 with more than 400 Jewish men, women and children inside. Ratz of New York, who was 14 years old when atrocities began in Riga, remembers the times in his book, “Endless Miracles.” He saw tragic Latvian history begin to unfold as a Soviet tank rolled down his street on June 17, 1940.

“I gaped in horror as it ran over some people, leaving their crushed and bloody bodies in the street. That was the first time in my life that I saw bloodshed and corpses,” he said. It was just the beginning of grim experiences for Ratz.

Nazis shortly replaced the Soviets, and Ratz became eyewitness to hundreds of murders as he and his father passed through and miraculously survived concentration camps including Salaspils, Strutthof and death marches in between.

On Sunday, July 4, Riga’s Jewish community gathered under umbrellas and commemorated once again the burning of the synagogue on Gogol Street where a memorial wall has been built from fragments of the great shul. The services there and elsewhere in Latvia, Daugavpils, Liepaja and other towns which were declared Jew free after ethnic cleansing in the ‘40s went off without interference from dissidents.

The time has come for Latvia as a country to deal with what happened during Soviet and Nazi occupations and to examine the participation of Latvians in death and destruction, said President Guntis Ulmanis, convening the first meeting of an international committee sponsored by the Latvian government on July 1.

The main task of the commission is to take a look at Latvia’s history to get an unbiased view of totalitarian crimes, Ulmanis said after the meeting. Historians from five countries-Latvia, Estonia, Lithuania, Poland and the United States attended.

Ulmanis and panel chairman, Andris Caune of the Latvian Historical Institute, declared in talking to reporters that history needs to be opened and examined. However, the meeting, at the president’s palace was closed to reporters and the public. The meeting was for preliminary strategies, and how much will come of the committee remains to be seen.

When the commission meets again next March, it will address its tasks in four parts: the study of crimes against humanity 1940 to 1941 (during Soviet dominance), German occupation of Latvia and the Holocaust against Jews and Gypsies, Nazi and Soviet crimes against Latvia after 1944.

“We need full research and full evidence to help to integrate our society, to inform the Latvian society and foreign societies about Latvian history, which is very difficult, is very hard to understand, because we had very tragic events occur when Latvians were in the SS army during the Holocaust,” said Ulmanis’ spokeswoman, Vita Savika.

Some say that there needs to be a committee for each regime, or there must be a committee for each group, non-Jewish Latvians and Latvian Jews.

Grigory Levin said it doesn’t matter how many committees there are if they are not talking to the right people.

“It depends on the members of the committees. If they are only talking to secular Jews, then the final outcome will not be worth a penny,” said Levin, a Riga resident. “They need to include Jews who were dissidents during hard times, and Jews who practiced Judaism and stayed religious during Soviet times because they had stamina when money was not worth as much as ideas.”

Savika said the composition of the group came up during planning.

“One committee can address the persecutions of both dictatorships. The issue to have two committees, one for Holocaust and one for the Soviet regime, was discussed, but it was decided to have one commission because those times were very difficult, and there was a holocaust and repression made by both regimes. It was armies against citizens, you see in both cases.”

Alfred Senn, a historian from University of Wisconsin in Madigan, said that his own interest is in the conflicting histories, “how the Latvians would write the histories and how the Jews would write the histories of the 1940s. The histories deal with different priorities, different perspectives. The task is to bring histories together,” Senn said. “I am opposed to two separate committees because that says the Jews are not a part of Latvian history.”

What progress was made at the July 1 meeting?

“We, the foreigners, have come to offer suggestions and opportunity to the Latvians, but it is the Latvians that have to do the work. We are simply trying to advise and help.”

© The Baltic Times. 08.07.1999