Churbn Lettland: The Destruction of the Jews of Latvia (review)

More than fifty years after its publication in German, an English-language translation of Max Kaufmann’s Churbn Lettland finally has appeared. The book is more than a near-contemporaneous account of the annihilation of Latvia’s Jewish community by a careful observer who lived through the horrors of Nazi occupation. As Kaufmann acknowledged, the writing was therapeutic: “I do not want the reader to regard the following report as a memoir in the proper sense of the word, but rather as the outpourings of a heavy heart that wishes to rid itself of all these terrible experiences and to forget them.” A real strength of the book comes from the temporal proximity of the events the author experienced in Riga to his recording of them; many facts and details remained fresh and clear in his mind. The disadvantage lay, however, in the lack of emotional distance: Kaufmann had lost his entire family in the murderous years of German occupation and saw the near complete destruction of Latvian Jewry unfolding right before his eyes. He was still mourning as he prepared the text, still attempting to come to terms with the destruction to which he had been a witness.

Editor Gertrude Schneider, a historian and herself a survivor of the Riga ghetto, points out that Kaufmann sometimes erred when discussing the fate of Jews deported to Riga from other European cities. But at the time of his writing, Kaufmann had access only to some of the materials from the trials at Nuremberg and the prosecution of Friedrich Jeckeln in Riga. Soon after it was published in 1947, the book became the standard (and for a long time the only) work on the Holocaust in Latvia. While historians have criticized the author’s errors and omissions, the work remains a key source for those conducting research on the Holocaust in Latvia. Each chapter contains the names of numerous victims—names that have yet to be found elsewhere, either in the archives or in the literature.

Kaufmann chose a methodological approach that links his recollections to a systematic analysis of the destruction of Latvia’s Jews. He took upon himself the enormous task of placing the events he experienced into a broader context. The book is organized into four parts: Part One narrates the experiences of Latvia’s Jewish community from the Soviet occupation in June 1940 through the German invasion and the initial stages of persecution of the Jews by the Nazis and their Latvian collaborators. The author shares his first-hand observations on the establishment and development of the Riga ghetto and describes its various functions—details essential to a fuller understanding of life and death in the ghetto. The initial phase of the destruction, the incarceration of 29,602 Latvian Jews beginning in July 1941, runs through the mass shootings of November 30 and December 8, 1941 at Rumbula.

Kaufmann traces the ghetto history through the second phase, the establishment of one area within the ghetto known as the “small ghetto” for the 4,500 surviving Latvian Jews, and another known as the “large ghetto” or “German ghetto” for the approximately 20,000 deported Jews from Germany, Austria, and the Czech Protectorate. Kaufmann identifies clearly the differing roles of these two areas and the often troubled interactions between their residents. The second part of the book adds further detail on a number of issues and events connected to the Holocaust in Latvia, including the use of local prisons to incarcerate Jews, the establishment of the Jumpravmuiža/Jungfernhof concentration camp, the role of media in inciting hatred, the tragic death of the noted historian Simon Dubnow, and the shooting of Jews in municipalities other than Riga. In this part of the book Kaufmann deals with the murder of his son, a death that left him shattered.

Part Three addresses fundamental aspects of the survival of the persecuted Jews in Latvia: the forced labor and concentration...