Small Riga Ghetto

Gertrude Schneider *
Introduction
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Max Kaufmann was a complicated, enigmatic man. He could be charming and
gracious one minute, and absolutely tactless and insulting the next one. There
was a self-righteousness about him that some people found disturbing, but it
befitted him, for in his way and to his way of thinking, he had always done the
proper thing before, during, and after the war.
That war, the most catastrophic event in the life of European Jewry, had
robbed him of his beloved wife Franka and his only child, a son, who was the
apple of his eye and of whom he was justly proud. As he once told me, these
two people were his raison d'être and losing them in such a brutal manner, described
in this book, changed his formerly gentle nature to one of bitterness.
For the rest of his life he lived for one thing only and that was to take revenge.
I had met his son Arthur in Riga's German ghetto, during an Oneg Shabbat.
Many teenagers from both the German and the Latvian ghettos, divided though
they were by barbed wire, attended these Friday evenings, watched over by
the trustworthy Latvian Jewish police. Arthur did not come very often. He told
one of the German Jews, a boy his age, that his father was not happy when he
went to the German ghetto, since he thought, as did many of the other Latvian
Jews, that their families had been murdered so as to make space for the German,
Austrian and Czech Jews, who arrived shortly after the bloody massacres
endured by their Latvian brethren.
As did most other people in the ghettos, father and son went to work each
day, but were in different Kommandos. Kaufmann was Kolonnenfuehrer of his
work detail. He was liked and respected by both Latvian and German Jews,
and he did his utmost to lighten their burdens; at one time, when Kommandant
Roschmann wanted to send one of the workers to the Central Jail for some insignificant
misdemeanor, Kaufmann managed to persuade him to let the man
continue with his "important" work for the war effort. The Kommandant relented.
During the spring of 1943, as the two ghettos were slowly emptied, the
Kaufmanns were sent to the peatbogs of Sloka, and the elder Kaufmann had a
premonition of disaster. In later years, he often mentioned it. Yet, although the
work was hard, father and son were together and that was all that mattered.
* Dr. Gertrude Schneider, Graduate School of C.U.N.Y., President, Ph.D. Alumni Association;
author of 8 books, 6 in English, 2 in German.