Small Riga Ghetto

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For this reason, some of them threw themselves under the wheels of the moving
train.
The cattle cars that had brought the new arrivals were shunted directly onto
the tracks leading to Kaiserwald. The Jews of Vilno still had a great number of
valuables with them. But when they saw Kaiserwald and the misery in store
for them there, they threw their possessions into the latrines or buried them in
the sand. Thus the Kaiserwald "VIPs" got hold of an especially tasty morsel,
and this rich transport was talked about for a long time afterward.
After the Kajlis factory in Vilno had been liquidated, the second transport
came from there to Kaiserwald. Two more transports from Daugavpils came in
the fall of 1943 and at the end of that year.
About one hundred Polish Jews arrived from the small Lithuanian town of
Olea. * Their home town was the industrial city of Sgerz in the Lodz district.
Because they had been prisoners since 1939, they had already been through
countless camps, and so they were no longer impressed by Kaiserwald in any
way. The head of their work crew was Ignatz, whom we got to know better in
Magdeburg later on.
Individual women and children had been gathered together in Pskow and the
occupied areas of the East and brought to Kaiserwald. All of the new arrivals
were distributed among the various work crews.
A large group of Hungarian Jewish women were in Kaiserwald for only a
short time. They were sent on to Spilve, and after that point all traces of them
have been lost. This group turned up in the middle of 1944, in a very poor
condition.
I found out later that these women had not been registered in the Kaiserwald
card file.
Kaiserwald provided the human material for all the new satellite camps and
for the establishment of small concentration camps. As early as the summer of
1943 the first work crews came from there to the Sloka paper factory, where
they had to work under very bad conditions.
Jews were also sent to do a variety of peat-cutting work, harvest sugar beets,
and work in the sugar beet factory in Jelgava. A large transport, consisting
mostly of Jews from Vilno, was sent to Estonia. They worked in the stone
quarries there for the petroleum factories and came to a tragic end in the
Klooga camp and other klogendigen (wretched) camps. This transport included
* [Ed.: Perhaps the author meant Lioliai.]