The Savers
Like all peoples, including mine, the Latvians had their villains and heroes. It required courage to help persecuted Jews, and real heroism to give them shelter, for harboring Jews was punishable by death. The Nazarene called on people to be not only just but also merciful. In Latvia as in other Nazi-occupied European countries there were people who could in this regard be truly called Christians.
The Latvian Lutheran archbishop, Dr. Teodors Grinbergs succeeded in obtaining the release of Jews who had converted to Christianity from the ghetto, and in ensuring that Latvian-Jewish married couples could continue to live together in freedom (Ralph Rotenberg, Kirche im Osten VIII 1965, p 117). He also obtained the release of a Lutheran minister who was to be sent to a concentration camp for having led prayers for the Jewish people.
Meir Levinstein writes in his memoirs that when he worked in a Jewish forced labor crew in Riga's goods station and port in the fall of 1941, there were always people who gave him bread and other food so he gave his ghetto rations to his family. Later, when Levinstein and other Jews worked in the German army's garage (Heereskraftfahrpark) at the corner of Valmieras and Matisa Streets, Latvian drivers always gave them bread. The German NCOs looked down on the Latvians, considering them Bauernvolk, a lower race, and frequently beat them, not to mention what they did to the Jews, who were not even considered people.
A Latvian from Riga, born in 1925, was conscripted into the RAD (Reichsarbeitsdienst, German labor service) in the fall of 1943, and later into the Latvian Legion. He received serious eye and leg injuries during battles in Pomerania in March 1945. This man wrote me as follows:
It distresses me that Latvians could have been capable of anything so unchivalrous and that they could act so brutally, for I considered my people to be good and just … The following winter I looked over the high fence surrounding the Jewish cemetery at Smerli. It was a grotesque sight: the monument to the Jews who had given their lives in the fight for Latvian independence next to the burned-out synagogue [burned in July 1941 along with the people herded inside]. Dear Mr. Gordon please don't be offended by what I have written, for I somehow also feel guilty for the sins of my people".
He also writes in the letter of his father who had a restaurant in the Moscow suburb of Riga. When this neighborhood was made into the ghetto in the fall of 1941, he had to move to the center of town:
Since we hadn't been able to move everything yet, Riga's SD gave us an entry and exit pass, for the ghetto was strongly guarded. . . . On these trips my father smuggled in food, cigarettes, etc., for his Jewish merchant friends. I went along on these trips. For me it was an exciting adventure. When a SD patrol appeared, we unloaded the old chairs off the cart, then loaded them back on again. . .
It was much more dangerous to harbor Jews, saving them from certain death. In November 1944, when Riga was already in the hands of the Soviet army, members of the Latvian resistance working for the Latvian Central Council (LCP from the Latvian name) located one of the Jews hiding in dug-outs in the Kurzeme forest, living off food supplied by local inhabitants. In great secrecy he was brought to the port city of Ventspils, from where the Latvians and this Jew fled across the Baltic Sea to Sweden. In Sweden this man, Israel Michelson, testified to the International Red Cross about Nazi atrocities in Latvia. Valentine Lasmane who still lives in Sweden was one of the participants in this daring escape.
The late Frida Michelson (no relation to Israel Michelson) writes in her memoirs that she managed to survive by lying beneath piles of clothes of those shot in the Rumbula forest. She was sheltered by two Latvian families, the Berzins and Mezulis families, and later by a group of Seventh Day Adventists, who hid her and supplied her with food the entire time until the Germans fled from Riga.
Near Kraslava a pious Roman Catholic woman, Petronella Vilmane, hid a 13-year-old Jewish girl from Daugavpils, Maja Zarch, on her uncle’s farm. In Liepaja several Jews -- Mrs. Raikin and her small son Michael and Hilde Skutelsky and others -- were hidden by a minister who settled in exile in the United States. Jews were saved by Anna Fimbauere, the nurse Emilija Strelis and Anna Zvirgzdina. These women have passed away but Zvirgzdina's son lives in Stockholm., the Martyrs’ and Heroes’ Remembrance Authority in Jerusalem, has sent him the medal and diploma of honor awarded to his mother.
Arel Westerman and his wife, now living in Israel, were saved by the Latvian Roberts Sedols, who unfortunately did not survive the war. He was a Janitor and later the manager of a building at 22 Triton Street in Liepaja, in whose basement he hid Jews. In Liepaja alone, Latvians saved at least 22 Jews from certain death.
In New York on December 11, 1986, the group Jewish Survivors of Latvia in the US honored the Latvian Catholic priest Kazimirs Vilnis. In 1941 he hid David Patzkin in his house in Mezaparks (Kaiserwald) on the outskirts of Riga. Patzkin survived the German occupation and after the war settled in New York. At the end of the ceremony everyone joined in singing the national anthem of independent Latvia, "Dievs, sveti Latviju".
During the German occupation, notices like the following would appear in the newspapers Tevija, Deutsche Zeitung im Ostland, and others: "The Latvian Anna Polis was shot at 15 Peldu Street, Riga, two days after several Jews had been found hidden in her home." Not far from there the teacher Elvira Ronis and her mother hid a group of Jews for six months.
In the files of the Jerusalem memorial institute Yad Vashem are testimonies about Latvians who saved Jews. Among them is the Ozolins family -- Anna, Eduards, Voldemars, and Janis – also, Katrina Skujina, the aforementioned Anna Zvirgzdina, and Freds Bankovics. Freds Bankovics, born in 1908 in the small Latgale town of Karsava, hid not just his wife Rachel Edelman, but also a six year old Jewish girl, Judith Silber and later also Sonia Mimkin (born in 1913) and the boy Liova Udem. He was helped by the Latvian policeman Eduards Stabins, who was conscripted into the Latvian Legion. Not all Latvian policemen, who then perforce worked for the Germans, were German myrmidons. Freds Bankovics was later arrested by the Cheka (KGB) on suspicion of being a German spy. Sonia Mimkin, whom he had saved, went to Moscow and successfully appealed to the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR and to the State Procurator's Office for his release from the Reutovo concentration camp.
Bernhard Press, born 1917 in Riga, and now living in West Berlin remembers:
About 27,000 Jews were shot in two "actions", on November 30 and December 8, 1941, among them my mother and all our relatives. After the second “action” I wrote a guarded letter to the wife of Professor Krumins, asking her for a clandestine meeting. My father and I were at that time working on the railroad for the Germans, loading wagons with goods for the front. Every morning our column of workers, consisting of about 100 to 150men, walked, guarded only by two Germans (there was no place for a Jew to flee to) through the dark streets to the main building of the railroad administration. It was there that we met Mrs. Krumins and her elder daughter, who in a hurried conversation told us we could come to their place as soon as our lives were in danger.
A couple of days later my father and I slipped away in the darkness of the morning out of the column of workers and reached the flat of the Krumins family. There we stayed for two years and ten months -- from December 13, 1941, to October 13, 1944, the day the Russian army entered the town -- without ever leaving the flat.
The Krumins family who saved our lives were just acquaintances of ours. My father had seen the professor a couple of times professionally, my mother had met Mrs. Krumins at some Italian courses that both ladies frequented. Otherwise no ties existed between the families. Soon after the Germans entered the town Mrs. Krumins came to see us and took our valuables, saying they would be safer at their place. When my father and I were in jail, the family tried to contact certain Latvian circles in order to help my mother obtain our release. Mrs. Krumins and her elder daughter had also come to the ghetto when it was still open, bringing food for us and repeatedly saying that we were to come to their place if our lives should be in danger. One of the last things my mother told me was not to seek help from the Krumins family, because it was not decent to worry other people with one's personal troubles. For once I did not obey her. The family consisted of Professor Arturs Krumins, who was at that time professor of architecture at the Riga Polytechnic Institute and later, after the war, became a member of the Academy of Sciences of the Latvian SSR, his wife Emma Krumins, their elder daughter Velta Meters and their younger daughter Ilga Krumins. Their cook Lina Pilsroze also lived in the same apartment. An important part in rescuing us was played by the teacher Elza Mileika, who not only became a close friend of ours (we did not know her before), but who occupied herself most actively in providing for our living… The food coupons the Krumins family received were hardly sufficient for themselves, let alone two unexpected “guests.” It was Elza Maleika who took upon herself the task of providing for us. She had many very close friends among her colleagues and also many friends among peasants in the country. She mobolized all of them, and, by the way, many of them wondered how it was that a family of two, she and her mother, could consume so much food. Once a week she used to appear at our flat with a big basket full of bread, or bacon, or meat, depending on her luck . . .
The only other people who knew of our existence were Professor Stalbergs (an architect too) and his wife, a physician, who was Jewish.
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Last but not least, here is the saga of Zanis Lipke, from the B’nai B'rith Bulletin of Australia and New Zealand, vol. 22, no 22, June 1977:
Seventy people attended a luncheon at B'nai B'nth Lodge Home in Sydney on Sunday, May 21, to pay tribute to Zanis Lipke from Riga. A tall, erect, silver- haired man in his mid seventies, Mr. Lipke and his family have been honoured by Israel's Yad Vashem as “righteous gentiles” for their courageous help in saving Jewish lives from Hitler's persecutors in the years 1941-44 in Riga.
B'nai B'rith District 21, taking the opportunity of Mr. Lipke’s brief visit to his son Alfred, who lives in Australia at Anna Bay NSW, presented Mr. Lipke with a special certificate flown out from B'nai B'rith in Washington.
Zanis Lipke risked his life, and that of his wife and family, again and again, to save 41 Latvian Jews from certain death. Zanis Lipke was a wharf laborer in Pardaugava [the part of Riga situated on the left bank of the Daugava river]. When all the Jews were driven into the ghetto, Zanis got a job as a porter in the “Red Warehouses” (Sarkanie Spikeri), managed by the German Luftwaffe. Each morning he was to transport a group from the ghetto to the stores and supervise their work He was able to help them with food and medicine. Because the guards at the ghetto gates only counted the returning prisoners without checking names, Latvian friends of Zanis donned yellow stars and made up the numbers. With organized commotion at the gates, Jews would remove their stars and walk out as Aryans in charge of the groups which had been brought in. Once, unable to find a trusted person nearby, it is said Zanis pinned a yellow star on himself and his group walked into the ghetto without an escort, but with the correct number of people.
In September 1941 Zanis came under suspicion and a sudden search of his house was organized. At that time he had given sanctuary to a Jewish friend, Chaim Smolanski, who had injured his foot in the warehouse and could barely move. The guards found the fugitive and marched him and Zanis to the police station, after looting the house.
“Two guards in naval uniform met us at the police station”, recalls Smolanski, who survived the occupation. “One of them pointed a gun at me, ready to shoot. Zanis jumped in front of me, shielding me with his body and shouting angrily: 'Kill me first you son of a bitch! You don't even know who this man is. He is working for me and I am responsible to the Germans for him'. The guard was stunned by this outburst. He cursed and had us put into a prison cell. Next day Zanis was let out. He bribed a policeman. A couple of days later he got me out the same way. In the ghetto this incident was considered a miracle. Never before had anyone come back alive from the police.”
From October 25, the gates of the ghetto were finally closed, the guard strengthened. Jews returning from work were frisked thoroughly and cruelly punished it the smallest bit of food was found on them. Zanis warned his friends: "Build hiding places in the ghetto. When danger comes, hide for a day or two. When things calm down a bit, I'll come and take you away."
Forty thousand lives were mown down in Riga, mainly those of children, women and the elderly. Ghetto pavements were littered with the limbs and shattered corpses of children thrown from upper floors, and with the useless possessions of the deceived victims, who were told that they were being transferred to a different camp.
“I was standing alongside my father at the barbed wire of the ghetto. I was eight years old,” recalls Zanis' younger son Zigfrids. "I shall always remember his trembling voice: ‘Look, my son. Look, and never forget.’ Tears were streaming down his cheeks".
Only men, slaves for work, were now left in the ghetto. It was clear they would be killed as soon as they became unnecessary. Zanis started feverishly searching the town for hiding places for these people. He found a cellar here, an abandoned building there. When safe hiding spots ran out, Zanis Lipke decided to build an underground bunker in a shed near his house. The frost was severe, the ground had to be heated by a blow torch, and no one had any experience for such a construction. When the warm weather melted the snow, the lot caved in and had to be started all over again. Zanis appropriated wood logs, tiles, mortar, whatever building materials he could find. A well-concealed bunker was soon finished. Zanis, his wife Johanna, and eldest son Alfreds provided the fugitives with guns, bullets, and a radio set, in addition to food.
Until the beginning of 1943, Zanis planned and plotted with a handful of loyal friends to encourage Jews to escape from the ghetto and hide in the forest. They were fed and hidden. Not all managed to outsmart the Germans, unfortunately, but not for want of Zanis’ trying.
Early in 1943, Zanis exchanged his job at the Luftwaffe stores for one working in the country. This allowed him to travel legally all over the countryside to transport fugitives to hiding places in haystacks and farm lofts or cellars. He could also supply them more easily with food. Latvians working in the recruitment office for rural laborers drifted away under the lax supervision. Zanis took possession of the keys to the office [which was in Riga] and used it as a temporary retreat for concentration camp fugitives waiting for transport to safer hiding places.
Zanis never lagged in his mission of rescue, even in the terrible days of 1944, when the SS with the help of police dogs hunted fugitives and those who gave them help all over Riga, shooting on sight.
. . . Zanis now lives alone in an old house where so many exciting events happened in years past. Thanks to the efforts of his friends, he was granted the rank of “personal pensioner” of Latvia, but little prosperity accompanies the title.
Most of the material on Zanis Lipke and his exploits, based on interviews with survivors, was sent to the Israeli Institute of Research on the Holocaust and Heroism, Yad Vashem, in Jerusalem. He and his wife were awarded the highest recognition, the “Medal of the Righteous,” and were invited to plant a tree on the Avenue for Righteous Gentiles in Israel in 1966. However, the Soviet government denied them permission to attend.
Now, eleven years later, he has been permitted to visit his son Alfred, who fled Latvia and lives in Anna Bay. Members of B'nai B'rith Russian Repatriants Lodge "Let My People Go" in Tel Aviv, some of whom are from Riga, brought the case to the attention of Brother Dr. N. Urmann of Melbourne, while he was in Israel. Brother Brian Lenny of Sydney located Zanis Lipke's son and arranged a meeting to coordinate some long-overdue tributes.
The first of these, the Medal of Honour from Yad Vashem, was presented to Mr. Lipke by the Israeli Consul General, Mr. David Ben Dov, at the community Holocaust Remembrance Night in Sydney in April.
Now for the aftermath of Lipke's visit to Australia. The Soviet authorities had allowed him to visit his son in Australia but denied him permission to go to Israel where he was eagerly awaited by so many Jews that he had saved. In Australia, Zanis Lipke accepted the air ticket to Israel given him by the people mentioned above. The flight was the next day. The Soviet consulate was closed; however the Israeli consulate was open.
In short, Zanis Lipke arrived in Israel and planted a tree in the Avenue of the Righteous on the Mount of Remembrance. Israel's largest newspaper, Ma'ariv, carried a lengthy article about him, and on August 30, 1977, the Association of Latvian and Estonian Jews in Israel and B'nai B'nth organized a ceremony in his honor. The 77 year old man had tears in his eyes when he saw the hall filled with people and heard the thunderous applause with which he was received. I had the honor to address Zanis Lipke that evening in Latvian. I quoted from the Holy Scriptures, Genesis 18, 26-32: "If I find in the city of Sodom fifty good men I will pardon the whole place for their sake. For the sake of ten I will not destroy it". Ending my short talk, I paraphrased the first words of the Latvian national anthem “Dievs sveti Latviju” – “God bless Latvia for having people like you.”