OPINION  |  HISTORY  |  LATVIA

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by Roland Binet  (De Panne, Belgium)

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Simon Wiesenthal recounted that he escaped the threat of imminent death seven times as a slave and captive of the Nazis during World War II. Frida Michelson, a Latvian Jew from Riga, escaped an imminent death when on December 8, 1941, moments before she would have been ordered into a grave to be shot in Rumbula, she threw herself on the ground in the snow and pretended to be dead. She was saved by the fact that hundreds of pairs of shoes were piled on her body covering her from the eyes of the murderers, who did not discover her. Otherwise, she would not have told her story to David Silberman.[1]

For those interested in the massacres in Rumbula of November 30 and December 8, 1941 when around 26,000 Jews were killed by bullets — women, children, elderly and men. Most were taken out from the Riga Ghetto and transported to Rumbula, but some were shot in the streets of the ghetto or on the streets leading to the Rumbula forest. Mitchell Lieber has brought to the world a remarkable documentary entitled Rumbula’s Echo where some Latvian Jewish Holocaust survivors were interviewed and which will be shown in the future.

For one human being to survive a Nazi massacre, as Frida Michelson did, was a feat so extraordinary and almost miraculous that we might well think that that person had been blessed with eternal life and nothing more could hurt or endanger her. This is most emphatically true in the zones east of the Molotov-Ribbentrop line, invaded by the Nazis in June 1941, where the murder rates at many locations were in the region of one hundred percent.

When the German army, accompanied by the killers of the Einsatzgruppen and the murderers from the S.D. conquered the territories of the USSR, including the Baltic republics, they stoked up an antisemitism that had been dormant or modestly palatable during the thirties. As most Jewish inhabitants of these countries could — at that time — live a nearly normal life. But, there was a distinct difference between the antisemitism of a population that had been under Russian and/or Communist yoke, be it for almost a year (as in the Baltics) or for a generation (as in the parts of Ukraine and Belarus there were part of the USSR from the post-World War I years) and, by contrast, the mostly traditional bourgeois antisemitism to be found in France (remember the Dreyfus affair), the Netherlands or Belgium.

In the Western European countries, antisemitism had in modern times nearly always been of an intellectual bent, not built on the myth that it had been the Jews who had had Jesus killed. The Baltic republics as well as Ukraine, Russia and Soviet Byelorussia (before the war constituting the eastern part of today’s Belarus) had been countries with perhaps a thinner veneer of West European style bourgeois civilization. These were countries where the population could most rapidly be excited by lies, slogans, and rumors. Given certain circumstances, some shocking part of these populations, in concentrated masses, would resort to killing Jews themselves in orgies of violence of varying orders of magnitude. With hindsight the violence of czarist era pogroms may seem miniscule compared to what would happen during the Holocaust, but it remains a fact that that is where the very word “pogrom” comes from.

In these countries, under Soviet domination until the arrival of the Nazis in June 1941, when the Nazis chased out the Communists and “liberated” these lands from the Soviet yoke, a top-end propaganda machine could quickly spread the concept of the “Judeo-Bolshevik” as a new descriptor for all persons of Jewish heritage. They unleashed the non-Jewish populations from the skein of civilized behavior they had adopted before they became Soviet citizens and, suddenly and brutally from the very first days of “liberation,” all their hatred and resentment against the Soviet state found one bloody outlet for their rage: the helpless, innocent neighboring Jewish fellow-citizens. Within a few days, the caught-off-guard Soviet powers collapsed and fled eastward to deep into Russia.

Frida Michelson had been born at the worst time and place.

Frida Michelson

Even before having been force-marched from the Riga Ghetto to the Rumbula forest to be killed, she had had a few narrow escapes. These she recounted to David Silberman. But, having survived Rumbula, her ordeal in fact just began. Thanks to luck and to a modest number of very courageous Latvians who defied death to hide her even for one night or in a shed, gave her shelter or food or both. She also often had to rough it, sleeping and living in cowshed, sheds, in the forest or hidden behind hay stacks.

Having survived imminent death would have been a feat by itself.

But Frida Michelson, as well as for the less than five percent percent of Jews who survived in the Baltic states, hiding in a totally alien, dangerous, malevolent and brutal human environment, meant in fact escaping hundreds of potential deaths during the roughly three years of facing insurmountable odds. Day after day, night after night.

That is why I consider each and every Jewish survivor of the Holocaust in the ex-Soviet Republics to be a special kind of hero. I am grateful that there have been people such as David Silberman who took the time and had the courage to defy the veil of silence that the autocratic and dictatorial Soviet authorities had put upon the fate of the Jews in their territories during World War II. Frida Michelson was asked by NKVD apparatchiks why she had survived (this appeared to them suspicious!). Indeed, her husband Mitja Michelson, also a survivor of the Riga Ghetto, was arrested and sent to Siberia as a supposed protagonist of a “Zionist revisionist” movement. One would have thought that having survived Hitler’s war of genocide would seem quite enough. But that would fail to take into account the true nature of Communist and Stalinist evils which had their own hideous characteristics.

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[1] I have just reread her moving account in a German translation entitled Ich überlebte Rumbula (Europäische Verlaganstalt, 2020), the original version having been transcribed and published by David Silberman in 1973 in Israel in Russian under the title Я Пережила Румбулу.