J. K. Rowling's increasing anti-trans extremism

Erin Reed, a transgender rights activist and author of the invaluable blog, Erin in the Morning, just posted a story today on J. K. Rowling's continued descent into the rabbit hole of anti-trans bigotry.

On Wednesday, J.K. Rowling implicitly denied that transgender individuals were targeted and that books about them were burned in Nazi Germany. This assertion contradicts abundant evidence that transgender people were among the first targeted by the Nazis' rise to power in Germany. This culminated in the looting of the Magnus Hirschfeld Institute of Sexology and the infamous burning of the initial decades of transgender healthcare research, as well as the internment, forced detransition, and murder of transgender citizens. When confronted with numerous scholarly sources, she instead linked to another thread that labeled the first transgender patient a "troubled male.”....

The exchange promoting a denial that transgender people were targeted in the Holocaust was triggered by a tweet questioning why individuals like Rowling increasingly find themselves aligned with Nazis, who burned books on transgender healthcare and research in 1933. Rather than defending her position, Rowling seemed to dismiss the notion altogether that transgender individuals were targeted, asking, "How did you type this out and press send without thinking ‘I should maybe check my source for this, because it might’ve been a fever dream’?" When others provided her with sources, she responded by linking to an anti-trans account calling the first transgender woman to undergo gender reassignment surgery in Germany to a "troubled male.” The thread in question also denied that transgender people were targeted by the Holocaust.

This is the tweet that Rowland posted:

 Alejandra Caraballo's response (https://twitter.com/Esqueer_/status/1767914998808953316):

Caraballo's links: 

Smithsonian article: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/new-research-reveals-how-the-nazis-targeted-transgender-people-180982931/ 

Article on Magnus Hirschfeld in the Holocaust Encyclopedia at the US Holocaust Memorial Museum's website: https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/magnus-hirschfeld-2

See also this article in Scientific American about the Institute for Sexology: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-forgotten-history-of-the-worlds-first-trans-clinic/

Rowling's response (clue: she's wrong):

Caraballo:

Article on the looting of Hirschfeld's Institute of Sexology on the website of the Holocaust Memorial Day Trust (UK): https://www.hmd.org.uk/resource/6-may-1933-looting-of-the-institute-of-sexology/

Continuing the exchange:

FigarOh: https://twitter.com/figar0h/status/1767913252141322748

Rowling: https://twitter.com/jk_rowling/status/1767928896454836646

Gorski: https://twitter.com/gorskon/status/1767980280160432337

Thank you Dr. Gorski!

Erin Reed:

The issue of Der Stürmer is from February 1929. The slogan at the bottom translates as: "The Jews are our misfortune." Source of the page from Der Stürmer: https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/photo/front-page-of-the-nazi-newspaper-der-stuermer.

As Erin Reed writes, Rowling's anti-trans rhetoric and demands are getting more and more extreme.

The statements, while part of an ongoing history of escalating anti-trans rhetoric from the author, signify a shift towards extremist views against transgender individuals. Leading anti-trans voices worldwide echo these viewpoints. Meanwhile, conservative activists are advocating for transgender eradication and the cessation of all related care. Rowling's recent engagement with Holocaust denial concerning transgender individuals only fuels the same fires that incinerated books about transgender people a century ago.

Yom Ha-Shoah - Mordekhai Falkon (originally published on April 25, 2006)

(Originally published on Tuesday, April 25, 2006)

Since today is Yom Ha-Shoah - the day of remembrance of the Holocaust - I thought I would mention briefly my grandfather's uncle, Mordekhai Falkon, who was murdered by the Nazis in Liepaja, Latvia (known also as Libau, Latvia), in the summer of 1941. Mordekhai corresponded with my grandfather, Mark Falcon Lesses, from the mid-1930s through March 18, 1940 (just before the Russian conquest of Latvia). My grandfather was a doctor, living in Boston, Massachusetts, with my grandmother and their two children. He was contacted by Mordekhai Falkon and by another relative living in Jelgava, Latvia, Sima Shlosberg - both sought affidavits so that they could immigrate to the United States.

This is the text of Mordekhai's last letter (that is, the last one that I know of, which was saved by my grandmother for many years after my grandfather died).

Liepaja, 18th March 1940

My dear Nephew,

Not being sure, that my letter written about two weeks before, will reach you, I write you today again. My wife has been sick for a long time, but now she is again well up. Also I am well, but since January the 1st I left all my business and since then I am nothing doing.

I am thanking you very much for your kind will to help me get into U.S., but as long as it is possible to live here, I should not leave our old home. Should unforeseen circumstances induce me to leave, I shall not fail to inform you in right time. All papers received from you I delivered to the U.S. Consulate, which will inform me, when my turn will come.

I hope you and your family are all well and I shall be glad to hear from you as often as possible.

With kindest regards from me and my wife

Your uncle
M. Falkon

[on the back of the envelope is stamped: Stockholm 20.3.40]

For the text of Mordekhai's other letters, see Letters from the Past. You can also find there letters from Sima Shlosberg and from Mordekhai's sister, Gittel Falkon Kagan, who lived in Moscow.

As I found out from subsequent correspondence with a relative, Sima survived the war. She married and lived in St. Petersburg, Russia, for many years, before dying in the mid-1980s. We do not know what happened to Gittel and her family in Russia, because there has been no contact since the late 1930s with them.

According to the extensive database of Libau Jews developed by Edward Anders and his co-workers, Mordekhai was likely killed in July, 1941. As soon as the Nazis entered Libau on June 29, 1941, they began killing Jews. Mordekhai's wife, Dobra, was killed on December 15, 1941, along with almost 3,000 other Libau Jews during three days of murder at the Skede dunes along the coast, about 15 km north of Libau. (For photographs of the killings, see Skede executions. Warning: graphic and disturbing photographs; the story of the photographs can be found on the Yad Vashem site). Mordekhai's son, Abram, and his two children, Betje and Genia, were also killed in 1941.

May they rest in peace.

Holocaust deniers try to disrupt conference on Mennonites and the Holocaust

In March 17 and 18, I went to a conference on Mennonites and the Holocaust that was held at Bethel College in North Newton, Kansas. It was very interesting, and I've been meaning to write up my impressions, but haven't gotten to it it.

The conference was disrupted a couple of times by a Mennonite denier of the Holocaust named Bruce Leichty, who was finally kicked off campus by the local police. He attempted to speak a couple of times during the question and answer period after the academic presentations, but was told to leave by the conference organizers.

Update: Lisa Schirch, in a contribution to the blog Anabaptist Historians, describes one of the incidents when Leichty attempted to disrupt the conference:

A Mennonite holocaust denier, Bruce Leichty, attended parts of the conference. Leichty is a California-based lawyer known for representing the Holocaust deniers Ernst Zundel and his Mennonite wife Ingrid Rimland Zundel. Leichty has passed out anti-semitic literature at the past several MCUSA gatherings. At the introduction of the conference, the organizers told the audience there was someone attending the conference who they were watching. But many were not in the room or did not understand what was being said. When Leichty began to ask an offensive question during the conference, the organizers removed him by calling campus security, but did not inform the audience of who the man was or why he was being removed. The lack of communication confused many in the audience.

Two of his compatriots in Holocaust denial, who are affiliated with the antisemitic group Deir Yassin Remembered (DYR), also went to North Newton - Daniel A. McGowan, emeritus professor of economics at Hobart and William Smith College in Geneva, New York, and Henry Herskovitz, who leads a weekly vigil outside a synagogue in Ann Arbor, Michigan. I saw and heard Leichty, but didn't see McGowan or Herskovitz, but apparently Herskowitz was hanging around the auditorium where the conference was held and he was also told to leave campus by the police. Herskovitz wrote up his reaction on his blog, hosted on the DYR website, where he wrote that Leichty was arrested and held by the local police for a number of hours. His arrest is recounted in an article posted on a Holocaust denial website, which I will not link to.

Herskovitz says that he and McGowan intended to give a kind of counter-talk outside the conference at a at a local meeting hall, called "Two Revisionist Jews Consider the Holocaust," and Leichty tried to hand out flyers about this meeting to the people at the conference. In all the reading I've done by and about McGowan, I've never seen the claim that he himself is Jewish, so I'm not sure where the title comes from. [I just looked again at Herskovitz's post, and he provides a link to a farcical document where he and Paul Eisen declare McGowan to be a Jew; Eisen is a co-founder of DYR].

The conference itself was very moving to me as an outsider, because so many of the Mennonite speakers and attendees were obviously troubled by the fraught history of Mennonites during the Holocaust. Mennonites were not persecuted by the Nazi regime, and in some places (Germany, Poland, and Ukraine) some collaborated with the Nazis, even to the extent of being part of one of the Einsatzgruppen (in Ukraine) - the Nazi killing squads that targeted Jews. Some Mennonites did try to protect and hide Jews, but most did not (as most European Christians did not). One of the talks was about Mennonites in the Netherlands who did work to rescue Jews.

Given the pained sincerity of most of the participants in the conference, it was really a violation to have Leichty appear and attempt to disrupt these difficult conversations with his crude and obtuse attacks upon historical truth. It is a pity that he and the other two deniers decided to push their agenda at such an important conference.

Update: Leichty apparently has a long history of pushing his antisemitic and Holocaust denial views among Mennonites. Vic Rosenthal, writing in Fresno Zionist in 2007, describes a talk organized by Leichty in a local Mennonite church. The speaker was Ingrid Rimland Zündel, wife of Ernst Zündel, who was imprisoned in Germany for Holocaust denial. The pastor of the church himself did not want Rimland Zündel to speak, and passed out flyers to try to dissuade people from going in and listening to her.

More on Leichty from the ADL: Anti-Semite Christopher Bollyn Scheduled to Attend 9-11 Events in California. 

Leichty is a problematic figure who has defended a number of Holocaust deniers, including Ernst Zundel, who is imprisoned in Germany for denying the Holocaust. Leichty also represented 9-11 widow Ellen Mariani in lawsuits against various entities she held accountable for her husband’s death. In motion papers, Leichty apparently used research from Bollyn to make spurious accusations against a Jewish judge on the case. In May 2012, the United States Court of Appeals sanctioned Leichty and Mariani for making frivolous arguments before the court and also highlighted the anti-Semitism reflected in the papers filed by Leichty.

Leichty is also a believer in other conspiracy theories, including those about the 9/11 attacks. He belongs to a group called "Lawyers for 9/11 Truth."

Leichty's antisemitism also showed up in a lawsuit he brought on behalf of a widow of a man who died in the 9/11 attacks: 9-11 Widow and Lawyer Sanctioned for Raw and Ugly Antisemitism. For a more objective report, see the New York Times article: Court Penalizes a Lawyer Over Slurs in a 9/11 Filing

Yom ha-Shoah 2018 - the murder of the Jews of Liepaja, Latvia

Tonight and tomorrow are Yom Ha-Shoah, and this is a post commemorating the deaths of the Jews of Latvia, among whom were my grandfather's uncle, Mordekhai Falkon, and his wife, Dobra Falkon.

A few years ago, I joined a Facebook group for Latvian and Estonian Jews in Israel. One of the latest posts provided a link to a documentary that has been made recently on the murder of the Jews of Latvia. (It is one of several made in the series, "SEARCHING FOR THE UNKNOWN HOLOCAUST").

The documentary, called "Drawers of Memory: The Holocaust in Latvia," interviews Jewish survivors and their non-Jewish neighbors about what happened in 1941, after the Nazis invaded the Soviet Union and conquered the Baltic states. A very high proportion of the Jews of Latvia were murdered by the Nazis and their Latvian collaborators, mostly by shooting (part of the "Holocaust of Bullets" which was perpetrated by the Einsatzgruppen, the squads of killers that followed the Wehrmacht as it invaded and conquered the western Soviet Union).

If you click on the video, it brings you to the segment on Liepaja (also known as Libau), where my grandfather's uncle, Mordekhai Falkon, lived with his wife Dobra. Mordekhai was probably killed in the summer of 1941, while Dovra probably died at the beach of Skede, north of Liepaja, where thousands of Liepaja Jews were murdered during December 15-17, 1941. The video shows the memorial at Skede, and the beach where people were killed. There are shown some photographs in a book of the Jews at Skede, before, during, and after they were shot. (My assumption is that a Nazi soldier or a Latvian collaborator took the photographs).

Methodist Church missionary calls for boycott of Holocaust events

Good article on Elder Of Ziyon about a Methodist missionary, who spent over a decade in Israel and Palestine, who calls for boycott of Holocaust events. Her name is Janet Lahr Lewis, and she is the new "Advocacy Coordinator for the Middle East" for the United Methodist Church. She wrote in a recent article:

Don't participate in Holocaust Remembrance Day without participating in Al Nakba Remembrance Day. Don't visit a Holocaust museum until there is one built to remember the other holocausts in the world: the on-going Palestinian holocaust, the Rwandan, the Native American, the Cambodian, the Armenian ... You could be waiting a long time!

She wants people to remember the Nakba, but illogically calls for people not to honor the memory of the Jews and others killed by the Nazis. Her "pro-Palestinian" advocacy thus consists of antisemitism. It's ignorant, too - there is a Native American museum on the mall in Washington, which covers the history of Native peoples, including genocide, as well as being a truly magnificent museum of Native American culture and art. It is well worth visiting on its own.

The US Holocaust Memorial Museum has an new exhibition on the Cambodian genocide - Cambodia 1975-1979. In addition, there are many memorials to the genocide in Cambodia itself. The Holocaust Memorial Day Trust, in Britain, also covers the genocide in Cambodia, as well as Rwanda, Bosnia, and Darfur. In Rwanda, there are also memorials to the genocide, including an important one in Kigali. There are also many memorials to the Armenian genocide around the world, both in Armenia itself and in countries of the Armenian diaspora, including one in Watertown, Massachusetts, close to where I grew up in Cambridge. There is a significant Armenian population in Watertown, and the memorial was put up in 1965.

Clearly, Ms.Lewis is abysmally ignorant of how the many peoples who have been subjected to genocide have remembered their own suffering. She is ignorant as well of museums and institutions that remember the Holocaust among the other instances of genocide and mass murder. It's rather appalling that the Methodist church thinks of her as an expert on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

In the Forest of History

Yesterday, I visited the LWL-Museum für Archäologie (Westphalian State Museum of Archeology) in Herne (not far from Bochum). The oldest finds are from about 250,000 years ago, the most recent from 1945. It is set up in a unique way - the permanent exhibition is below ground, as if it were an archaeological excavation. Many of the finds are displayed as they would have appeared when the archaeologists first discovered them. I found the museum rather disturbing at several points, and especially at the end.

As you walk in, you first encounter the "Forest of History" - a number of enormous tree trunks, set up as if they were a wood, that were discovered under water or in gravel pits in this region. They are between 5,000-14,000 years old, and were preserved in the water.

You then wend your way along a path through the museum, traveling chronologically from the distant past until 1945.

In the beginning of the museum there are many many stone tools, if you're interested in seeing their development and the different kinds of stone tools.

Many of the exhibits are taken from excavated graves, and thus include many grave goods - everyday or luxurious objects that were placed into the grave. The museum covers the transition from hunter-gatherer to agriculture, and includes a couple of dioramas of small agricultural settlements.

Model of an ancient agricultural settlement.

Model of another agricultural community, from the first millennium BCE.

Other finds, from between the sixth and the fourth millennium BCE, included a large variety of earthenware pots, some plain, some decorated.

Sixth millennium pots. The large pot in the middle has some interesting incised designs.

Fourth millennium pots.

The exhibits showed the transition from solely earthenware vessels to bronze and then iron objects. Bronze itself could not be manufactured in this area, because of the lack of copper and tin. Bronze was imported and was then worked on by local metalworkers.

Bronze knives and other objects, from between 2800-700 BCE, also grave goods.

A large bronze beaker, probably acquired through trade.

Apparently, before the Romans came and even for several hundred years after that, most people lived in isolated family farms, not even in small villages. The museum presented one example of a small settlement with bigger houses, where quite a number of families lived. The image below is a photograph of one of those reconstructed houses.

One of the most interesting pieces of historical information that I learned was that while the Romans tried to conquer the whole of Germany, they were unable to. Roman settlement had begun to the west of the Rhine, for example with the establishment of what is now known as the city of Cologne. When they tried to go east of the Rhine, the Roman legions were defeated in 9 CE in the "Battle of the Teutoberg Forest." After several more years of bitter fighting, the Romans decided to stay west of the Rhine, meaning that Bochum (which is east of the Rhine) was part of the area that did not become part of the Roman empire. I'm not particularly knowledgeable about Roman history outside of what is now Israel, so I had had the image in my head that the Roman legions were always victorious (since they put down at least three Jewish revolts - in 66-73, 115-117, and 132-135). The Germanic tribes, however, were better organized and much stronger than the Jewish rebels, so they were able to keep the Romans west of the Rhine.

But this did not mean that there was no contact with Rome. The museum catalog says, "All the same the Germanic tribes must have still had contacts with the Romans since in every Germanic settlement archaeologists find goods from the Roman Empire" (Das Museum, 2004, p. 43).

The region east of the Rhine came under the rule of Charlemagne in the eighth century, and he brought Christianity to the tribes in the east. As the catalog says, "At the end of the 8th century Charlemagne, king of the Franks, integrated the region of present-day Westphalia into his kingdom and had the inhabitants converted to Christianity." In the museum, to mark this event, one walks into a small room containing a "forest" of upright spears, and hears sounds of battle, including people's anguished cries, signifying the battles between Charlemagne and the Saxons.

The path then brings one into the Middle Ages, feudal manors, the building of castles, and then to the European voyages of discovery and the Renaissance. Much less space is devoted to these events than to the Roman and early Christian periods.

What came next was very disconcerting. The path leads one abruptly into the mid-20th century, and then you see several posts from the fence of a concentration camp that was established in Witten in 1944, as well as items from prisoners in the camp - identity disks, plates, and cutlery used by the prisoners. (Witten is a town right next to Bochum).

The camp housed prisoners who worked in local factories. About 750 prisoners were originally brought there from Buchenwald (the Witten camp belonged to the larger system of camps affiliated with Buchenwald), but many died due to ill-treatment, starvation, illness, unheated buildings, and inadequate clothing.


                                                         

On the left are the bowls, a pitcher, and cutlery.








To the right are the prisoners' identity tags.

I did some online research about the camp, and my next post will provide more information about the camp. There is now a memorial in Witten, in the location of the camp, and I'd like to visit there soon.


The final part of the path passes by items discovered in the rubble from Allied bombing of this part of
Germany. After the war, the bombed out sections of towns were rebuilt, which meant that the bomb rubble was covered by subsequent building. To right, in the glass case, are metal stamps used to make ration cards.

The museum was not what I was expecting. I thought it would be a more conventional museum, with exhibits in glass cases with explanations next to them. Instead, it was much more experiential. There were different sounds throughout the room. As you first walked in, through the ancient trees, you could hear the sound of lightning. Next to the cases filled with stone tools, there was the persistent sound of tapping. Leaving the small room the upright spears, in the doorway, a voice was reciting the Nicene Creed in German. In the enclosed "tent" with religious objects, there was the sound of church music and chanting. At the end, there were sounds of bombing.

This museum did not leave me with the feeling that history was safely in the past, and that when I left the museum I left the history behind, locked up in the building. No, history followed me out of the building, it came with me - the agricultural settlements in the woods, the battle in the forest between the Roman legions and the Germanic fighters, Charlemagne's armies converting people to Christianity, the Allied bombing and the inmates of the local concentration camp. It's all still here.

Bochum Jewish cemetery

Today I paid a visit to the Jewish cemetery in Bochum, on Wasserstrasse. It is a consolidated cemetery that includes burials and headstones from two other cemeteries that were moved in the post WWII period. I saw headstones from the late 19th century up to this year.

There is a clear division between the pre-WWII burials and those very few that came after the war, and then burials since the early 1990s. Those buried during the war include 52 Jewish forced laborers who died working in Bochum factories.

There are also memorial headstones for those killed by the Nazis.

The post-1990 burials are almost entirely of Jews from the former Soviet Union.

Here are some pictures of the headstones.

This is one side of a stone in the Jewish section of the Bochum, Germany, cemetery, for Eliezer Lipman, son of Ephraim Weiss, who was murdered by the Nazis on January 10, 1945 (Tevet 25, 5705). 

This photo depicts the other side of the gravestone in the previous photograph. Eliezer Lipman was the husband of Yital Glick (her maiden name), and the son of Leah Zimmerman (her maiden name).

This gravestone memorializes Yital bat R. Jacob Judah ha-Kohen Glick, and her children, Shmuel Benzion, Avraham Yehoshua, and Devorah-Hinda Tila; Leah bat R. Jacob Zimmerman, her daughter Rachel and her husband Hayyim Moshe ben Shelomo Zickerman, and their children Shelomo, Eliezer Lipman-Jacob, who were murdered by the Nazis on 22 Sivan 5704 (1944). "May God avenge their blood."

These are gravestones for two men who had worked as forced laborers in Bochum and died there. The one on the left is for Alfred Hofmann, born on January 1, 1945, and died on March 11, 1945. The abbreviation below his name says "May God avenge his blood." This abbreviation is on all of the stones for the forced laborers who died at the hands of the Nazis.

The one on the right is for Isidor Davidovits, born on May 31, 1911, died on March 14, 1945.

This is the gravestone of Kalman Rosenberg, born on April 5, 1897, died on December 5, 1944, another of the forced laborers.

Gravestone of Ella Neuberg-Lilienthal, who died on September 8, 1923, and three family members who died in the Holocaust and two who survived in Holland.

Alfred Neuberg died in Sobibor on May 21, 1943; Karl Neuberg died on March 31, 1944 in Auschwitz; and Lise Neuberg-Spiro died in the middle of 1944 in Poland. Two other relatives, Walter Neuberg (d. March 26, 1994) and Geertie Neuberg-Zijlstra (d. March 10, 1993), lived in Brielle, Holland.

Joe Weissman - his family's fate at Buchenwald and Sobibor

Joe Weissman, who blogs at Harry's Place, has written a very moving post about the fate of his family during the Shoah: My Weissmann family at Buchenwald and Sobibor.

His grandmother Lili, from Austria, was saved by the Kindertransport to London, but her father, Heinrich Weissmann, was murdered at Buchenwald, and her mother Anna and brother Heinz were murdered at Sobibor. They are pictured below (L-R: Anna, Lili, Heinz, Heinrich).

Jews of Libau / How not to be an antisemite / Losing the plot

In Norm's excellent series, "Figures from a dark time," he has just posted about the fate of the Jews of Libau/Liepaja, Latvia, which I have also written about. Norm's headline is "The figure 2700-2800."

On the night of December 13, 1941, Latvian policemen arrested the Jews of Liepaja and took them to jail. Those with work permits, along with their families, were released. 

The remaining Jews were taken to Skede, north of Liepaja, to the dunes overlooking the Baltic Sea, the site of a former military training [ground]. A long ditch had been dug just before the dunes. The Jews were forced to strip off their clothes except for their underwear. Near the ditch they then were made to take off their remaining clothes and assemble in groups of ten. They were executed by members of a Latvian SD guard platoon, units of the 21st Latvian police battalion, and members of the Schutzpolizei-Dienstabteilung (German security police) under the command of the local SS and Police Leader Fritz Dietrich. On the 15-17 of December, 2,700-2,800 Jews were massacred, most of them women and children.

His source is an article on the site of the US Holocaust Memorial Museum: This Month in Holocaust History, December 6.

Fat Man on a Keyboard (Peter Ryley) has also pointed to an excellent resource for those who wish to criticize Israel without being antisemitic, on a Tumblr blog called "This is not Jewish." His post is also very good, discussing the vexed question of "Why does the Israel/Palestine conflict send everybody gaga?"

The yellow room and the room of death

Peter Ryley of Fat Man on a Keyboard has just written an amazing and moving post that is first of all about thirteen posts written by George Szirtes. (This is the first one: On milieu and refuge - sketch 1).  His posts are meditations on a yellow room painted by Chagall, his mother, Hungary (where his family is from), Jewishness, the Holocaust, Israel, and refuge. They are well worth reading on their own.

Peter writes, "Whenever I read his poetry, I get a feeling that each word is casting a shadow, dappled layers of meaning, which lays bare a moment in time. In the darkest corners of those shadows lurk the ghosts of the worst of the twentieth century. They are not his own experiences; they are a room that he has necessarily passed through."

Peter starts his post by recounting his impression of conversations he has had with younger people about Israel/Palestine:

I sometimes have conversations about Israel/Palestine, both online and face-to face, with younger people and they disturb me. Their support for Palestinian statehood, something I have long shared, can often be scarcely differentiated from an anti-Israel sentiment that simply assumes the inherent wickedness of the state. It isn't hatred; it is disdain. Above all, what worries me is their certainty. Doubt does not trouble them, nor do they think of Israelis as anything other than oppressors. Does it ever cross their mind that they are Jews, or that the history of the conflict is inseparable from Jewish history and experience? I don't think so. As a result, they carelessly leave an intellectual door ajar and sometimes I wonder what it is that seeps in through the crack from the room beyond.

The next part of his post discusses Szirtes' thirteen posts "on milieu and refuge." His last paragraph addresses the young people again. He refers again to the yellow room evoked by George Szirtes - that comfortable, central European, faintly Hapsburg room of the Jewish middle class that was destroyed by the Nazis forever. That room suggests another room to him.

All of which brings me back to these perfectly decent young people and the ideologues who fill them with righteous ardour. It's odd, they never seem to mention the word Jew. Instead they use hopelessly inappropriate analogies – 'colonial settler state', 'apartheid state' and the like. Anything to avoid even thinking that they are talking about Jews and that this noble cause could have anything to do with Jewish people. There is a reason for that of course. We gentiles have a room too. It is part of our history and we don't want to think about it. If we do, it might dilute certainty with ambiguity. The room isn't yellow. Sometimes it is made out of rough planks, sometimes of cement and occasionally it is constructed from neatly dressed stone placed on a picturesque mound in a beautiful northern city. This room is part of our cultural inheritance and it is intrinsically tied up with Jews. It is the room in which we kill them. And so I think I know what bothers me. It is the smell seeping through that half closed door. I can recognise what it is now. 

It's gas.

I read, "This room is part of our cultural inheritance and it is intrinsically tied up with Jews," and then slammed into "It is the room in which we kill them."

It's remarkable to read such a clear-eyed statement of reality, of the truth of all the centuries of history when non-Jews have killed Jews simply because they were Jews. I'm Jewish and I appreciate it when someone who is not Jewish sees this so clearly.

New York Times coverage of Auschwitz

A comment on an earlier post about the British POWs who were held in one of the Auschwitz camps just wrote: "And the article's reference to the Red Cross reaction to rumours about Auschwitz reinforces the difficulty of verifying conditions at camps. Indeed, the Red Cross had some difficulty separating the German picture of life in POW camps from the harsh reality even at those they visited."

By the summer of 1944, however, quite a lot was known and the Red Cross, it seems to me, would have had full access to all the information known outside Nazi-occupied Europe. While the New York Times dragged its feet considerably about reporting on the extermination camps, by the summer of 1944 they were publishing reports about what was happening in Auschwitz-Birkenau.

This report was published on July 3, 1944, on page 3.

INQUIRY CONFIRMS NAZI DEATH CAMPS

1,715,000 Jews Said to Have Been Put to Death by the Germans Up to April 15

by Daniel T. Brigham

By Telephone to The New York Times

GENEVA, Switzerland, July 2 - Information reaching two European relief committees with headquarters in Switzerland has confirmed reports of the existence in Auschwitz and Birkenau in Upper Silesia of two "extermination camps" where more than 1,715,000 Jewish refugees were put to death between April 15, 1942 and April 15, 1944.

[Note: These figures are too high - according to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, "At least 960,000 Jews were killed in Auschwitz. Other victims included approximately 74,000 Poles, 21,000 Roma (Gypsies), and 15,000 Soviet prisoners of war; and 10,000-15,000 members of other nationalities (Soviet civilians, Czechs, Yugoslavs, French, Germans, and Austrians)"].

The two committees referred to are the International Church Movement Ecumenical Refugee Commission with headquarters in Geneva and the Fluchtingshilfe of Zurich, whose head, the Rev. Paul Voght, has disclosed a long report on the killings.

The article goes on to give estimates of the number of Jews killed in Auschwitz, and then refers to what was then the ongoing killing of the Jews of Hungary.

To this must now be added Hungary's Jews. About 30 percent of the 400,000 there have been slain or have died en route to Upper Silesia. Discussing "malicious, fiendish, inhuman brutality" in the treatment of Hungarian Jews, the Ecumenical Commission says:

"According to authenticated information now at hand, some 400,000 Hungarian Jews have been deported from their homeland since April 6 of this year under inhuman conditions to Upper Silesia. Those that did not die en route were delivered to the camps of Auschwitz and Birkenau in Upper Silesia, where during the past two years, it has now been learned, many hundreds of thousands of their co-religionists have been fiendishly done to death."

After a fortnight to three months' imprisonment, during which they were "selected" or worked to death, the Jews were led to the execution halls, it was said. These halls consist of fake bathing establishments handling 2,000 to 8,000 daily.

Another report was published in the Times on July 6, 1944, giving more details about the camp and the deportation of the Hungarian Jews, with the title "Two Death Camps Places of Horror," by Daniel Brigham.

An article from July 5 also discussed the deportations from Hungary, and includes this statement:

Information received by the World Jewish Congress leaves little doubt that the Germans are waging two wars - one against the enemies of Germany, the other against the Jews - and that, with Germany's defeat imminent, they are preparing to wipe out European Jewry. It is estimated conservatively that they have already massacred 4,000,000 of Europe's 7,000,000 Jews.

This article is called "Hungary Deports Jews, Eden Says." Eden was the British Foreign Secretary.

Later, on September 15, 1944, the Times reported on a German communique broadcast from Berlin. One sentence reads: "Enemy bomber and fighter formations yesterday attacked in the west and south of the Reich as far as central Germany. Terror raids were directly mainly against the towns of Stuttgart, Darmstadt, Osnabrueck and Auschwitz."

An earlier report, from June 20, 1944, reports on the killing of Czech Jews taken from Terezin to Auschwitz.

LONDON, June 19 - The Czechoslovak State Council disclosed today that, according to a report it has received from inside Europe, 7,000 Czechoslovak Jews interned in the fortress of Terezin have been killed en masse.

The report said that the victims were dragged to gas chambers in the notorious German concentration camps at Birkenau and Oswiecim. 

 Confirmation of the existence of these gas chambers and the execution of there of uncounted thousands was brought to London recently by a young Pole who had been imprisoned in both camps.

The first report in the New York Times of the liberation of the camp by the Red Army came on February 3, 1945, several days after the camp had been liberated (January 27).

 Saved from "Murder Factory"

MOSCOW, Feb. 2 (U.P.) - The newspaper Pravda reported today that the Red Army had saved several thousand tortured, emaciated inmates of the Germans greatest "murder factory" at Oswiecim in southwest Poland.

Pravda's correspondent said fragmentary reports indicated that at least 1,500,000 persons were slaughtered at Oswiecim. During 1941, 1942 and early 1943, he said, five trains arrived daily at Oswiecim with Russians, Poles, Jews, Czechs, French and Yugoslavs jammed in sealed cars. 

Holocaust as "educational experience"

Howard Jacobson: Ludicrous, brainwashed prejudice

Myself, I wouldn't bet heavily on there being good times ahead for Jews. Anti-Zionists can assure me all they like that their position entails no harm to Jews – only witness how many Jews are themselves anti-Zionist, they say – I no longer believe them. Individually, it is of course possible to care little for Israel and to care a great deal for Jews. But in the movement of events individuals lose their voice. What carries the day is consensus, and consensus is of necessity unsubtle. By brute consensus, now, Israel is the proof that Jews did not adequately learn the lesson of the Holocaust.

Forget Holocaust denial. Holocaust denial is old hat. The new strategy – it showed its hand in Caryl Churchill's Seven Jewish Children, and surfaced again in Channel 4's recent series The Promise – is to depict the Holocaust in all its horror in order that Jews can be charged ("You, of all people") with failing to live up to it. By this logic the Holocaust becomes an educational experience from which Jews were ethically obliged to graduate summa cum laude, Israel being the proof that they didn't. "Jews know more than anyone that killing civilians is wrong," resounds an unmistakably authorial voice in The Promise. Thus are Jews doubly damned: to the Holocaust itself and to the moral wasteland of having found no humanising redemption in its horrors.

Read the whole thing.

Secret Justice Department report on U.S. help to former Nazis

The New York Times has just posted to its website a secret, 617-page report prepared by the Justice Department on how the U.S. government helped former Nazis, and then prosecuted many who had come to the U.S. under false pretenses. The Justice Department ordered that the report be made, but then suppressed it for four years. Someone just gave the Times the full report, which is available at: Secret Justice Department Report Details How the U.S. Helped Former Nazis.

There is an appendix to the report that gives information about 143 Nazi persecutors whom the Office of Special Investigations, formed in 1979 to investigate and deport Nazi war criminals, prosecuted and attempted to deport (in many cases succeeding).

I have extracted the reports on those accused of committing atrocities in Latvia and Estonia, and they are copied here.

Bogdanovs, Boleslavs
Born: 1917, Russia
Died: 1984, US

Alleged Persecutory Activity: Member of the "Arajs Kommando," a Latvian death squad responsible for mass execution of thousands of civilians in Nazi-occupied Latvia. The victims of the mass shootings were mostly Jewish, but also included political enemies (those believed to be Communists), gypsies and the mentally ill. The leader of the organization, Viktor Arajs, was convicted in West Germany for leading the unit in murdering more than 13,000 people.

Legal history: Denaturalization proceedings commenced in Nov. 1983. Bogdanovs died before the case was resolved.

Detlavs, Karlis
Born: 1911, Latvia
Died: 1983, US

Alleged Persecutory Activity: As a member of the Latvian Auxiliary Security Police, he executed Jews in the Riga ghetto and chose Jews for execution in the Dwinsk ghetto.

Legal History: Detlavs never became a U.S. citizen. INS filed a deportation action in 1976. An immigration judge rejected the government’s case in 1980 and that decision was affirmed on appeal the following year.

Didrichsons, Valdis
Born: 1913, Latvia
Died: 1995, U.S. A
Alleged Persecutory Activity: Member of the Arajs Kommando (see Bogdanovs).
Legal History: The government filed a denaturalization suit in May 1988. The case settled in Feb. 1990 with Didrichsons agreeing to relinquish his citizenship. Because he was ill, the U.S. agreed not to institute deportation proceedings.

Hazners, Vilis
Born: 1905, Latvia
Died: 1989, U.S.
Alleged Persecutory Activity: Selected Latvian Jews in the Dwinsk ghetto for execution.
Legal History: Hazners never became a U.S. citizen. A denaturalization action was filed by INS in Jan. 1977. The government’s claims were rejected in 1980 and OSI handled the appeal. The immigration judge’s decision was affirmed in 1981.

Inde, Edgars
Born: 1909, Latvia
Died: 1980, U.S.
Alleged Persecutory Activity: Member of the Arajs Kommando (see Bogdanovs)
Legal History: The government filed a denaturalization suit in Aug. 1988. Inde died before the court issued a ruling. [RL: There’s obviously an error in dates here].

Kalejs, Konrads.
Born: 1913, Latvia
Died: 2001, Australia
Alleged Persecutory Activity: Officer in the Arajs Kommando (see Bogdanovs) and a guard supervisor at the Salaspils concentration camp near Riga, Latvia.
Legal History: Kalejs never became a U.S. citizen. A deportation action was filed in Nov. 1984 and he was ordered deported to Australia in Nov. 1988. His appeals were exhausted in Mar. 1994 and he was deported the following month. See pp. 469-478,493.

Kaklins, Talivaldis
Born: 1914, Latvia
Died: 1983, U.S.
Alleged Persecutory Activity: Member of Latvian District Police and director of the Madona concentration camp in Latvia. As a member of the District Police, he participated in two mass executions of hundreds of Jews and Soviet activists.
Legal History: A denaturalization case was filed in 1981. It was pending when he died.

Kauls, Juris
Born: 1912, Latvia
Alleged Persecutory Activity: Deputy chief and Commander of the guards at a Nazi concentration camp near Riga, Latvia
Legal History: A denaturalization case was filed in 1984. Kauls left for Germany in 1988 while the case was still pending. The court entered a default judgment of denaturalization.

Kirsteins, Mikelis
Born: 1916, Russia
Died: 1994, U.S.
Alleged Persecutory Activity: Member of the Arajs Kommando (see Bogdanovs)
Legal History: A denaturalization case was filed in July 1987. The case settled in Dec. 1991, with Kirsteins relinquishing his citizenship and the U.S. agreeing not to file a deportation action unless the defendant's medical condition improved.

Laipenieks, Edgars
Born: 1913, Latvia
Died: 1998, U.S.
Alleged Persecutory Activity: Member of the Latvian Political Police which pursued Jews and Communists.
Legal History: Laipenieks never became a U.S. citizen. A deportation case was filed in June 1981. The government lost; the decision was reversed on appeal, and then reversed again. See pp. 117-126.

Linnas, Karl
Born: 1919, Estonia
Died: 1987, U.S.S.R.
Alleged Persecutory Activity: Chief of concentration camp in Tartu, Estonia
Legal History: Denaturalization proceedings commenced in Nov. 1979. Linnas' citizenship was revoked in June 1981 and his appeals were exhausted in Oct. 1982. A deportation action was filed in June 1982 and Linnas was ordered deported in May 1983. Appeals were exhausted in Apr. 1987 at which time he was deported to the U.S.S.R. See pp. 273-297.

Maikovskis, Boleslavs*
Born: 1904, Latvia
Died: 1996, Germany
Alleged Persecutory Activity: Latvian chief of police who participated in the arrest of civilians and the burning of their dwellings.
Legal History: Maikovskis never became a U.S. citizen. INS filed a deportation case in Oct. 1976. Maikovskis was ordered deported to Switzerland in Aug. 1984. Switzerland would not allow him entry and OSI asked the court to modify its order to designate the U.S.S.R. In Oct. 1987, while that request was pending, Maikovskis left for West Germany. In 1988, Germany charged him with war crimes. His trial was suspended due to the defendant's ill health. See pp. 430, 433-434.

Sprogis, Elmars
Born: 1914, Latvia
Died: 1991, U.S.
Alleged Persecutory Activity: Assistant Chief of Police in Gulbene, Latvia. He was involved in the arrest, transportation, and confiscation of property from nine Jews, the transportation of 100 to 150 Jews to the site of their execution, and the appropriation of furniture from the houses of arested Jews. Legal History: A denaturalization complaint was filed in June 1982. The government lost the case both in the district court and on appeal. See pp. 101-105.

Trucis, Arnolds
Born: 1909, Latvia
Died: 1981, U.S.
Alleged persecutory activity: Member of the Latvian Auxiliary Police and the Security Service of the SS which guarded and beat Jewish civilians.
Legal History: A denaturalization action was filed in June 1980. Trucis died before the matter was resolved.

Yad Vashem - Untold Stories of the Murder Sites in the Occupied USSR

I just came across a New York Times article published last year about new research being done at Yad Vashem on lesser-known killing fields in the Holocaust: "New Looks at the Fields of Death for Jews" (April 19, 2009). One report about Liepaja is from a German sailor who filmed the killings at Skede.

One little-known case comes from a German sailor who filmed killings in Liepaja, Latvia. The film has been on view for some years at the Yad Vashem museum. But the new Web site has a forgotten video of a 1981 interview with the sailor, Reinhard Wiener, who said he had been a bystander with a movie camera.

According to part of his account, “After the civilian guards with the yellow armbands shouted once again, I was able to identify them as Latvian home guardsmen. The Jews, whom I was able to recognize by now, were forced to jump over the sides of the truck onto the ground. Among them were crippled and weak people, who were caught by the others.

“At first, they had to line up in a row, before they were chased toward the trench. This was done by SS and Latvian home guardsmen. Then the Jews were forced to jump into the trench and to run along inside it until the end. They had to stand with their back to the firing squad. At that time, the moment they saw the trench, they probably knew what would happen to them. They must have felt it, because underneath there was already a layer of corpses, over which was spread a thin layer of sand.

Yad Vashem has created a website devoted to this topic - the Untold Stories. There are several pages devoted to what happened in Liepaja.

Sima Schlossberg and her family in Jelgava

I just found another resource to research the Jews of Latvia - the Latvian Names Project. It is an attempt to do for all of the Jews of Latvia what Edward Anders and his co-workers were able to do for Liepaja - identify the fates of Jews who lived in Latvia before the Second World War. In 1935 the Latvian census recorded 93,479 Jews living in Latvia.

I looked up the name of my relative from Jelgava, Latvia - Sima Schlossberg. She came up on the list, and so did the names of her family - names that she doesn't refer to in her letters to my grandfather. Her sister's name was Miriam, and she was born on August 5, 1909. Sima herself was born on November 27, 1911. Their parents' names were Itzik Ruben and Esther Raschel. Only the possible fate of Miriam Schlossberg is mentioned - in the Riga Ghetto.

Looking back in correspondence from March and April of 2004 (with Miriam's daughter and with a cousin of Sima's), I discover, however, that I do know the fates of the people in the family. Sima escaped from Riga in 1941 with her parents first to Russia and then to Uzbekistan. Her sister Miriam was already living there because she had fled earlier. Sima's father Itzik died in 1942 from hunger. The two sisters and their mother survived the war. In 1942, Miriam married a man named Mikhail Golod, and her daughter was born in 1943 in Bukhara. They returned to Riga in 1945. Sima worked as a bookkeeper, and in 1955 was married to a man named Nohum Bruk and moved with him to St. Petersburg. She died there in 1988, leaving no children behind. Miriam died in 1980 and her mother Esther Raschel died in 1984 at the age of 100.

I'm going to have to write to the Latvian Names Project and give them information on all of these people.

Websites on journeys to Liepaja

A number of other people have made a similar journey to Liepaja to see where their ancestors lived. I just found a website created by Arturo and Marc Porzecanski about their visit to Liepaja (among other places in eastern Europe) in 2002: Our trip. The direct link to the page on Liepaja is: Our Trip to Liepaja.

Brian Friedman created the Welcome to Avaslan website about his family in eastern Europe, including Liepaja. Like me and the Porzecanskis, he found the house where his relatives in Liepaja had lived. He also has a page on the Killing Fields of Skede and photographs of the memorials there.

Touring Copenhagen - Resistance Museum

I arrived in Copenhagen Friday afternoon from Tartu, via Riga (which was a little nerve-wracking, because I had left one piece of luggage in the luggage storage room in the airport, and I had to figure out how to get it on as hand luggage without paying an enormous sum of money to Air Baltic, which allows only one piece of checked luggage - but I did get it on without having to pay). I was pretty tired, so I didn't go anywhere once I got here, but I went out yesterday morning. The first challenge was figuring out how to buy a metro ticket at the closest stop - there were directions in English, but they weren't very clear. With the help of several patient Danish people, I bought the ticket and headed for my first destination, the harbor, where I was going to take a harbor tour.

It was really a beautiful day - not too hot, with a nice breeze, and it was great to be out on the water. We sailed into the harbor and on several canals (I hadn't realized before this that Copenhagen has canals), passing lots of other tourist boats doing the same thing.

People relaxing at the water's edge, with the Amalieborg castles behind them.

When we got back, I was hungry and had lunch in an Italian restaurant (of which Copenhagen appears to have an abundance). I then walked over to the Museum of the Danish Resistance (during WWII), which turned out to be quite an affecting museum. It covered the whole period from the German invasion in April 1940 to the liberation in May 1945, including the rescue of the Danish Jews from Nazi deportation. The story is really quite amazing. Almost all were ferried to Sweden by the Danish resistance; only about 450 were captured and sent to Terezin, and of those, about 400 survived.

The museum was divided into several sections, starting with a general introduction to Nazism. While some of the exhibits were photographs or facsimiles, many were authentic artifacts of the time period. One of the first items that I saw, to my shock, was the label below from a canister of Zyklon B, which had been found by a Dane in the hold of a sunken German ship.

The next part of the museum was devoted to the first stage of the Nazi occupation of Denmark – accommodation to the wishes of the occupiers. Germany occupied Denmark on April 9, 1940, and the Danish government quickly capitulated. The Germans ruled Denmark through a Danish government coalition, so that full Nazi policies were not implemented (for example anti-Jewish legislation). This included Denmark furnishing Germany with many of its food needs during the war, as well as favorable trade agreements for Germany. The next item illustrates this trade.

These are toy figures of Hitler and Mussolini, purchased in a Copenhagen store in 1943. It had somehow never occurred to me that little figurines of fascist dictators were made – presumably for children to play with!

This is one of the German ENIGMA code machines, which was used by the German Navy in Esbjerg, Denmark.





  The Communist Party was not outlawed in Denmark until the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941. At that point, the Germans told the Danish government to intern the leaders of the Danish communists, which they did. In November 1942 about 250 were sent to the Horseroed camp, which was run by the Danish police, not by the Nazi Gestapo (later on it was taken over by the Nazis).

A drawing from the internment camp by one of the inmates, Knudaage Larsen.

The next part of the museum was devoted to various types of Danish resistance to German rule in the early years of the occupation. An underground press flourished with newspapers produced by various factions of the Danish resistance. The picture above is of the printing press used to print a newspaper called “Frit Danmark,” which was a collaboration between Communists and Conservatives.

The Danish resistance was in close communication with the British by various methods, including illegal telegraph machines. The picture below shows a reconstruction of a room with equipment used by a telegraphist.

The Jews of Denmark were untouched by German persecution until the Danish government resigned in the summer of 1943, in the face of German decrees that they could not accept. This meant that Denmark was now under direct German rule, and they quickly organized for the arrest of the entire Danish Jewish community on October 1-2 (Rosh Hashanah). The Danish underground found out about the German decree, and through quick action, managed to save almost the entire community by ferrying them to Sweden.

On the right is a model of one of the boats used to ferry Jews to Sweden.

About 500 Jews, however, did not manage to get away – they were captured and sent to Terezin. Most of them survived the war without being deported to Auschwitz because of pressure exerted by the Danish government and aid sent by the Danish Red Cross.

(I visited Terezin in the summer of 2005 when I visited Prague - I wrote about it here).

This is a revolting German propaganda poster [from 1942] about Jews being forced to wear the yellow star. The text reads:

The cat cannot change his spots!

The leading English newspaper "Daily Mail" reported:

"The participation of Jews in breaking British wartime economic legislation has caused Judaism and Jewish names to be ostracized in England, said the Chief Rabbi Dr. J. Hertz in a London synagogue."

With these accusations, the rabbi certainly wanted to warn his racial comrades to greater caution in their dark black marketing business, so that the English people would not recognize whose lice are in the fur. His efforts, however, are likely to be in vain. So are the Jews. First they chase the people into war, and while the soldiers of those nations fight and bleed, they make business out of the war, pushing and cheating and filling their filthy pockets at the expense of their host peoples. In Germany the blame was pinned on them. We have separated them from the German national community and they are marked with a yellow Star of David.

Everyone knows: Whoever wears this sign is an enemy of our people.

A jacket belonging to one of the Danish Jews imprisoned in Terezin. 481 Danish Jews were imprisoned in Terezin, of which 51 died there. The rest were sent to Sweden at the end of the war.










When I came out of the museum I was feeling sad at the fate of some of the resistance fighters (who were captured and executed by the Nazis), and sat for a little while thinking and looking out over a stream. I then walked towards what turned out to be a fort, but on the way encountered a statue erected after the war, dedicated to those who had fallen in the war. (It's below).

Our fallen
in Danish and allied war service
1940-1945
Raised by the Danish people

Libau and Skede - remembrances of the past

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, 2010

When 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

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.

From Liepaja, July 22, 2010

From Liepaja, July 22, 2010

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.

From Liepaja, July 22, 2010

From Liepaja, July 22, 2010

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.”

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.

From Liepaja, July 22, 2010

From Liepaja, July 22, 2010

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.

From Liepaja, July 22, 2010

This part of the plaque explains what happened to the Jews of Liepaja.

From Liepaja, July 22, 2010

Names of the rescuers of Jews. Robert and Johanna Seduls saved eleven Jews by hiding them in their basement.

From Liepaja, July 22, 2010

Names of those who donated to make the memorial possible, including myself.

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.

From Liepaja, July 22, 2010

Notice the apartment building behind the foundations – it’s from the Soviet period.

The next few buildings are from Barenu iela.

From Liepaja, July 22, 2010

16 Barenu iela.

From Liepaja, July 22, 2010

From Liepaja, July 22, 2010

20 Barenu iela.

From Liepaja, July 22, 2010

16 Barenu iela.

From Liepaja, July 22, 2010

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.