Small Riga Ghetto

84
Later it became known that the "transfer" to eternity had taken place that very
night in the woods of Biķernieki.
The children and relatives who had been left behind believed the whole time
in the existence of the factory in Daugavgrīva. The commandant was even so
polite as to have it announced that everyone had settled in well at the canning
factory and that in the summer they would return to the ghetto.
In this case too, they let the Latvians carry out the extermination. This and
many other similar deeds will remain an indelible disgrace for the Latvian
people.
In the ghetto, people even talked about a second transfer to the satellite camp
in Daugavgrīva, but I didn't know anything about it personally. *
The first transfer had claimed the lives of more than a thousand Jewish men
and women.
XII.
When the sorting of the collected property of the Jews "evacuated" from the
Large Ghetto was finished, the area command headquarters decided to distribute
all of these things for giveaway prices to the Latvian population as a reward
for their service.
As we went to work in the gray light of early morning, we saw long lines of
Latvian women who had come to shop for blood-soaked Jewish clothing and
other things. These shameless people stood in line for hours. The whole bargain
sale in the ghetto lasted for months. Thus it is certainly no exaggeration
when I say that every Latvian household owns the bloody belongings of Jews.
Nor was the Jewish cemetery left in peace!
Because the space available there was no longer sufficient and the demand
for it was very great, it was decided to blow up the old graves (see the chapter
"Kworim Weinen").
One day an acquaintance, Stanislaw Przedborski, visited me at my work station.
He was living in the city with Aryan documents that identified him as
Polish, and he told me various news items from there. Among other things, he
said that a Polish Jew named Raft, from Warsaw, had been murdered in his
* [Ed.: The two "transfers" occurred on February 5, 1942 and March 15, 1942. The first "Aktion"
numbered 1100 Jews (700 from the Berlin group and 400 from the Vienna group). The
second "Aktion" contained members of every one of the German groups (with most of them
from Berlin), totaling almost 3,000 Jews, mainly old, ill, or children. After that second "Aktion",
the victim's belongings were brought into the ghetto to be sorted. Thus, everyone in the
German ghetto realized that their loved ones had been murdered.]