Small Riga Ghetto

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about the Holocaust in Latvia after survivors and eyewitnesses are no longer
able to do so.
Fortunately, outside Latvia, a number of serious scholarly studies have appeared
in recent years. * The new availability of a large volume of archival material
that had been inaccessible prior to the disintegration of the Soviet Union
offered - and continues to offer - unique opportunities for scholars to undertake
such research.
Still, there is something missing in much of the recent work on the Holocaust
in Latvia, and that is the voice of the survivors. Though they were few in
number, and fewer still today, nearly 70 years after the catastrophe, the survivors
of the Holocaust in Latvia offer a perspective that is unique, powerful,
weighty with compassion for the victims, and authoritative by virtue of their
having been there. Surely, as Max Kaufmann acknowledges in his final pages,
there were things he could not know or might have forgotten before he sat
down to write Churbn Lettland. But he was there, and his "whole downcast
heart” is contained in the book.
In 1947 Kaufmann succeeded in capturing the day by day agony of the Jews
of Latvia between 1941 and 1945. His book communicates through lived experience
the depth of their suffering and despair; life and death as they really
were during that time; and the extraordinary sequence of events and choices
that could result, at the end of those years, in survival - his own survival, submerged
in the immense losses of community, family and home that he had endured.
In telling the story of the destruction of the Jews of Latvia, Kaufmann
recalls the names of people lost, the locations where they lived and died, the
camps to which the remnants of the community were sent after the orgy of killing
of the first year of the war, and the routes along which they were taken,
first to concentration and labor camps in Germany, and then elsewhere, at
war's end, to try to reestablish some semblance of normality in their lives.
Kaufmann "shared," as he put it, "step by step, the martyrdom of his countrymen
and coreligionists."
As we approach an era when survivors will no longer be with us to recall
with love the innocents lost and to inspire us and our children and our children's
children to remember and to learn from the unprecedented tragedy of
the Holocaust, making Max Kaufmann's early chronicle available in an Eng-
* Recent examples, both published originally in German, include: Andrej Angrick and Peter
Klein, The Final Solution in Riga: Exploitation and Annihilation, 1941–1944 (Berghahn
Books, 2009); and Bernhard Press, Murder of the Jews in Latvia, 1941-1945 (Evanston, IL,
Northwestern University Press, 2000).