Latvijas Vēsturnieku komisijas raksti - 18.sējums "Holokausts Latvijā

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Pētījumi par holokausta problēmām Latvijā
Jews was one side of the Nazi policy, poisoning their mind was another one. Whatever
the level of anti-Semitism was in Latvia, the Nazis made it much worse. In that sense
anti-Semitism in Latvia was much more the result of the Holocaust than its cause. One
of the Nazi public relations lines, beginning at least in the 1930s, was to assert that
the peoples of the world hated Jews more than did the Germans. It is remarkable that
many surviving Jews emerged from the Holocaust believing the truth of that chestnut.
Numerous survivors have written as well as told me directly that the “Latvians were
worse than the Germans.” Whatever that comparison may mean, we can also note that
the above assertion also corresponds with the Nazi propaganda line.
Whatever the parentage of the survivors’ tenets of history may be, Holocaust
historians, after the full story is laid out, will need to explain why many survivors writing
their memoirs fifty years after the event, after numerous sources have flooded in, are
hung up on absurd and demonstrably counterfactual conclusions and stories. For
starters even the memoir writer, instead of reading and repeating each others stories,
could consult Arājs trial records in Hamburg Germany, in which these precepts were
examined.
Among the insupportable assertions one can name the following: (1) that prior to
the German occupation there was a Latvian center that planned the killing of the Jews;
(2) that an uncounted number of Jews were killed by Latvians prior to the German
occupation; (3) the most absurd of all, is that while Latvians were killing Jews the
Germans saved them. 13 Like Latvians and the state of Latvia ought to face the Latvian
role in the Holocaust, the surviving Jews ought to face the stubborn fact that Latvia
was an occupied country. They ought to show an understanding of the system that
Germans imposed within their zones of sovereignty. To me the three above assertions
that some surviving Jews view as unquestionably true, appear as basic misjudgments
of the Nazi regime.
Max Kaufmann’s Die Vernichtung der Juden Lettlands, published in 1947, was
the first, and still is the most extensive memoir by a Holocaust survivor in Latvia, and
is one that contains the three misapprehensions. It is remarkable that years have not
mellowed these assertions but, if anything, they have rigidified them. For example,
Bernhard Press, who was hidden by his father’s Latvian colleague throughout the
Holocaust, in 1988 wrote that on July 1, 1941, standing near the Freedom Monument,
only a few hours after German arrival in Riga, he saw a column of Jews escorted by
armed young Latvians turning in from Rainis Boulevard onto Brīvības Street passing
the monument. Press continues:
The thirty to forty Jews silently passed us. The crowd applauded and some loudly
yelled out that it is time for the Jews do something useful. I stood as if numbed.
What would the people do with me, if they knew who I was? What I saw here