Small Riga Ghetto

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In Kaiserwald Salaman, Duchownik and Rosenthal were first severely tortured
and then transported to "points unknown". The other people from the
construction section had a black point sewn onto the backs of their prisoners'
uniforms, which meant they were next in line for transport to Stützpunkt.
Lewin and Magarik were exempted from this transport because they paid the
labor deployment team well. All the others had to go to prison, and from there
to Stützpunkt.
Like everywhere else, our women and men had their hair cut, and the men
had the usual stripe shaved down the middle of their heads. The shoemaker
Kagan, who was bald, had a stripe painted down the middle of his head with
paint.
Blatterspiegel, who was at that time an SS Scharführer, was determined to
get S. Rubinstein from the Park work crew and put him in prison, so he ordered
him to be transported to Lenta. Later on, Rubinstein returned to the Park
work crew, was arrested there, and was thrown into prison, where he died.
Three people disappeared from the camp one afternoon in July 1944; they
included Willy Nogaller and Miss Lilly Kreitzer. They escaped through the
potato cellar.
During one action that was carried out in our camp to exterminate older people,
an SS man came to check us against his list. One after another we had to
march past him. As we did so he selected five women, including Mrs. Barenblatt
and Mrs. Minsker. When he came back the next day to fetch them, I told
him they had already been transported to Kaiserwald, which of course was not
true. In any case, that time their lives were saved. When Kaiserwald called up
Eggers to ask for the women again, he gave them the same information – that
they had been sent off and ought to be there already – and so the whole attempt
came to nothing.
In the meantime Jelgava, which is about 50 kilometers from Riga, was occupied
by the Russians. There was a great panic in all the administrative offices.
They began to evacuate us. Willingly and even eagerly, we packed our things.
This was probably the only piece of work that we did with real pleasure.
On the evening of 29 July 1944 our comrades Dr. Rudow, Isia Pristin and
Mrs. Rudow escaped very suddenly from our barracks camp. We found out
later that they had taken off their marked clothing in a cellar room and had fled
to a nearby courtyard using a second key. From there they reached Dzirnavu
Street. The reason for their hasty flight was that the "Aryan" Rudow had told
them that an Action was planned for that night and that they absolutely had to
flee. Rudow himself also disappeared from Lenta.