by Daša Drndic
Immediately before the German invasion of Latvia, in the summer of 1941, the Soviet deportations of Latvians to gulags are increasingly swift and massive. Total madness overcomes the secret police. Or more precisely, from June 13 to 14, the secret police arrest people hysterically, they escort them under guard to the railway stations and put them onto what are by then just emblematic cattle cars. With no court order, with no explanation, the secret police burst into apartments in the middle of the night and give their captives sixty minutes to pack the most essential items, the rest is confiscated by Mother Russia: land, livestock, factories, buildings, apartments, shops, savings deposits, cars, boats, jewelry, gold, people. Thus, 19,184 people — 8,275 men, 7,168 women and 3,741 children under the age of sixteen — go off to labor camps in the Siberian backwoods, men to some, women to others. On the journey, 43 people die and 700 are shot on the spot, as they are arrested, so they have no chance of ever returning. Some, the survivors, reeducated, would surface some fifteen years later as wrecks, quiet and ill, harmless, that is to say useless. The aim of the NKVD had been to remove families whose members were in leading positions in state or local government, in the economy and in culture. Almost 1 percent of the population of Latvia was wiped out, and of the 126,000 Latvians who found themselves in the Soviet Union, 75,000 were arrested and sent to gulags, while 20,000 were shot.
In 1941, Karlo Osterman is in Split. Since the Soviet authorities had plundered everything from the little Landsberg family, taking their factory, shop, part of their apartment and their renown, they had become a nondescript family, so they were left in Riga. Perhaps it would have been better if they had been deported. Perhaps some of them would have come back. At least Frida.
On June 22, 1941, Nazi Germany attacked the USSR. The NKVD still had time in Latvia to organize the deportation of political prisoners, “enemies of the people,” involved in “counterrevolutionary activities,” and to condemn them without redress, for “not singing ‘The Internationale’ on May 1,” for “singing traditional Latvian songs,” for “exploitation of the working people,” for “hiding in the woods,” for “membership of a student organization,” for “membership of a youth organization,” because they were “policemen,” because “in the Latvian Army they fought against the Bolsheviks,” because “they were anti-Bolshevik,” because they had “criticized the Communist Party,” because they “ignored soldiers of the Red Army,” because they “encouraged hatred toward other nations,” because they “read the foreign press and spoke foreign languages,” there is no end to the list, the list could have come out of the notebooks of Daniil Kharms, who would also be arrested by the NKVD a few months later, but in his native Petrograd, Leningrad at the time, and placed in a psychiatric hospital, where he soon died of starvation.
The NKVD also had time for arrests and pronouncing sentences without proof or trial, and for murders. Four days later, on June 26, 1941, a total of 3,600 prisoners left Latvia in special trains. Less than 1 percent came back. Those who were not shoved onto trains were tortured by the NKVD, then shot and thrown into shallow mass graves with twenty or thirty other corpses, which were hastily covered with soil and then relatively swiftly, and for propaganda purposes, uncovered by the Einsatzgruppe A (SS mobile unit, the paramilitary detachment of death). In the courtyard of the Central Prison in Riga, and in Baltezers, Rēzekne, Ulbroka, on the aerodrome in Krustpils, in Babīte, Dreilini, Stopini, corpses lay around everywhere, bodies with their skulls shot through, arms tied with wire, maimed, disfigured, their teeth knocked out, their eyes gouged out, some recognizable, others not. The Red Army retreated from the Baltic, and in the NKVD prisons they left a multitude of instruments of torture, those for breaking bones, for crushing testicles, for piercing the soles of the feet and pulling out nails and all kinds of electrical apparatus. Up to the present day, many of those corpses found in the graves have remained nameless. People without a past, nonexistent people.
In 1912, a magnificent Secessionist residential building was erected on the corner of Brīvības and Stabu streets, with shops on the ground floor which did not become shops until the end of the twentieth century. It was first used by the Latvian pre-war Ministry of Internal Affairs, and then in 1940 by the Soviet secret police, the KGB. During the German occupation some youth organizations gathered there, only for it to be taken over again in 1944 by the Soviets, who remained there for fifty years. Although the building itself was not moved, it was then situated on the corner of Lenin and Engels streets, while today it is back on the corner of Brīvības and Stabu, and for the sake of orientation, people call it the Corner House — Stūra maja. In the basement of that building, the KGB installed fourteen cells of different sizes, small, with one somewhat larger space — for liquidation. Here, between 1940 and 1941, terrible torture and executions took place, and continued afterward, when Latvia became Stalin’s private property. There were milder “treatments” of suspect aliens, summons to a “friendly conversation” and “cooperation.” Of course, it was from there that the deportations to gulags were also organized. It was in that street, Stabu iela, that the Landsberg family had lived. From number 99 to the Corner House took some twenty minutes at a gentle pace.
When, a month after the departure of the Soviets, the Nazis, with an already detailed plan for cleansing the terrain, that is, eliminating all undesirable residents — Jews, Roma and communists — and “saving” Latvia from those Bolshevik “barbarians,” permitted the public to “visit” the Corner House, to see the underground cells spattered with blood and the collection of instruments of torture, in order to stimulate a desire for revenge among the population, but also allegiance to the new, their own, regime. And it worked. What people had seen was pure horror. Only, to this day it has been impossible to bring to light the documents and notes of the KGB, lists of informers, collaborators and double secret agents, some of whom are still alive, presumably so that the population should not be additionally disturbed. It is all sealed and put away “in a safe place,” no one knows where. Perhaps too much truth is bad for the health.
In the collective memory of that small Baltic people, the year 1940–41 is remembered as Baigais Gads — the Year of Terror. That collective memory, like all memory, has holes, and with time experiences miraculous transformations, and there are still those who experience the arrival in Latvia of the Einsatzgruppe A, the SS detachment of death, not at all as the arrival of the Nazis with all that ideology of theirs, but as the “return” of the liberators. Of course, it does not occur to those planning the Nazi occupation of Latvia to restore its autonomy. The orders are unconditional and strict: it is compulsory to wear exclusively German uniforms, which is immediately accepted by members of the Latvian defense, police and paramilitary forces, then race laws come into force and life follows a well-trodden path. As early as July 10, 1941, Latvia is a component part of Nazi Germany, included in the Reichskommissariat Ostland and is called Generalbezirk Lettland, which is to say the State Province of Latvia. Anyone who does not respect the Nazi occupying regime, and those who collaborate with the Soviets, are under a death sentence. Then there are those types whom the Nazis called Juden, for whom there are special elimination programs. They are very swift, effective and uncompromising, these new SS arrivals. On Wednesday July 16, an order comes into force according to which Jews are forbidden to use public transport. Armed Latvian police arrest folk on a whim, and ten days later Jews can no longer go to parks, or swimming pools, they may not walk on pavements, they have to attach that star not only to their chests but also in the middle of their backs so they may be immediately detected in a crowd by truculent pure-blooded yes-men, and so on, all those already familiar outrages, which include the sterilization of the undesirable, and, in addition, non-Jews have the right to attack any Jew unpunished, whenever they feel like it, beat him up, snatch his possessions, which some do, completely unrestrainedly, foaming at the mouth and drooling as though they were sick with rabies. That reminded m
e of an identity card shown to me by a friend, a former volunteer in this last Croatian-Serbian war, which I’m not allowed to call a civil war, but I must stress that it was an aggressive one and, from the Croatian side, defensive, because the judge Turudić, who has ambitions to become the Minister of Police when (if) that right-wing party comes to power again, that judge threatens us with five years in prison, which, if I had wireless internet in that prison connecting me with the world, would be okay for me, electricity and food bills would evaporate and no one would bother me. That friend of mine soon left the unit where he was, he knows why, while I think it was partly because of what that identity card allowed: The bearer of this pass is permitted, within the conditions of the law, to ask a person for his or her papers, detain and hand them to the appropriate authority, enter another person’s apartment and other spaces to carry out a search without written instruction, to take temporarily items that may serve as evidence in criminal proceedings, and to carry out other tasks provided for by the law and other regulations. The bearer of this pass is entitled to carry a firearm and wear police uniform.
I have to scan this identity card in order to show it to you, because this friend of mine, who has neither apartment nor social security nor a job and who is very thin, is intending to sell it for three thousand euros.
It is interesting that the crest on this pass states: Socialist Republic of Croatia.
So, the SS arrive, the liberators arrive, the people are on the whole delighted and hopes for renewed Latvian independence grow. Briefly. The people, of course, do not know about the secret pact between Hitler and Stalin, because it is secret.
Alfred Rosenberg comes as well. He places his skill as a painter at the disposal of mobilizing the domiciled population and fanning its hatred for the Jews — those “servants of the communist regime” — and creates a series of propaganda posters with which both the Latvians and the SS decorate the town. On these posters, the Latvian SS volunteer force declares: Toward our common future, forward! The Latvian legionnaire commands: To arms, to work! You must fight for Latvia!
For the realization of their plans of broad — the broadest — dimensions in the Baltic countries, Germany lacked soldiers. Their hopes that there would be “spontaneous pogroms” of Latvian Jews came to nothing, and as early as the autumn of 1941 the Nazis began recruiting Latvians to police battalions, which on the whole operated on the front, but sometimes also behind it, away from the battle lines. They were all local lads under the strict supervision of Heinrich Himmler’s secret services. As early as July 1941 the SS founded the Latvian auxiliary security police, the so-called Sonderkommando Arājs under the command of Viktors Arājs, who recruited to his ranks alienated students and former military personnel of radically right-wing orientation, volunteers, of course. And “spontaneous” reprisals began. Under the direction of Reinhard Heydrich, the architect of the Holocaust, who less than six months later presided over the conference at Wannsee where the final solution to the Jewish question was sealed, that imaginative visionary, organizer of the fighting units (Einsatzgruppen) which followed the German troops at the beginning of the Second World War and “cleaned up the territory,” that lover and great connoisseur of music, a good violinist even, who grew up and died with music, that son of a composer and opera singer who founded the conservatoire in Halle and a mediocre pianist, that talented athlete, excellent swimmer, pilot and fencer, in his childhood and youth modest, shy and unsure of himself, to the end of his life tormented by doubt over his Jewish origins, that organizer of Kristallnacht skilled in creating spontaneous torrents of destruction against that dangerous, treacherous race, the Jews, that “man with a heart of steel,” as Hitler called him, so, with the directive of the high-ranking Nazi dignitary Reinhard Heydrich, officially responsible for the elimination of European Jews, “spontaneous” actions in Latvia could begin.
Viktors Arājs and Herberts Cukurs, multiplied horsemen of the Apocalypse, former members of the Latvian fascist party Pērkonkrusts, and their companions, including that chess master Kārlis Ozols, were solidly armed and thoroughly shaved.
Viktors Arājs (1910–88), Latvian collaborator and SS-Sturmbannführer (major), was accused in West Germany of participation in the murder of thirteen thousand people and in 1980 sentenced to life imprisonment. His closest colleague was the chess master, the great patriot Kārlis Ozols. The horrors carried out by his units in the name of the Nazi authorities are among the cruelest atrocities of the Second World War. In the indictment it is stated that between July and December 1941, the paramilitary formation Sonderkommando Arājs alone carried out death campaigns in which thirty-five thousand Jews were killed, first in Latvia, then in Belorussia. After 1949, when he was released from the British prisoner-of-war camp in Germany, Arājs worked as a driver for the British armed forces in Delmenhorst, then, with the help of the London-based Latvian government in exile, he changed his name to Victor Zeibots and got a job at a printers in Frankfurt am Main.
He died in solitary confinement in prison in Kassel.
Herberts Cukurs (1900–65) was a war criminal, a Latvian collaborator, never brought to court. A pilot and designer of aircraft. He was killed by agents of Mossad in Uruguay. He was known as “the Butcher of Riga.” Today in Latvia some people are “abridging” his biography, and organizing exhibitions in honor of the “national hero” Herberts Cukurs, and in October 2014, a private company put on a production of a musical celebrating Herberts Cukurs, their Latvian aviation legend, in song and dance. The authorities did not ban that monstrous show, but just gently (and feebly) condemned it. All of this is somehow reminiscent, I won’t say of what, when or where, and probably politically correct.
Here’s our Kārlis Ozols (1912–2001) as well. He studied law at the University of Riga, but spent his whole life professionally involved with chess, except when he was killing. During the Second World War, he participated in the execution of thousands of Jews, which left some villages without any inhabitants. Like Arājs, Ozols studied the skills of carrying out mass murders in Germany, in Fürstenberg, in some institution there under the jurisdiction of Himmler’s secret service. He was a high-ranking official in the Latvian pro-Nazi Army, and with the arrival of the SS, he attached himself to the Latvian security police in Riga. He was accused of numerous monstrous crimes, but never taken to court. When in 1979 the Melbourne court invited him to make a statement under oath about his wartime activities, Ozols said, I have no idea what you are talking about. I know absolutely nothing about the horrors perpetrated against Jews and Roma. But it is not exactly the case that Ozols did not then know what he had done (although he really did suffer from dementia in his old age), because when he fled before the Red Army in 1944, with falsified papers, he hid with his wife and child in refugee camps in Windischbergerdorf, Bamberg, Wildflecken and Delmenhorst, where he occasionally played chess, and that is how he came across Leila’s father, that Arvīds Mazais, with whom, incidentally, in a whisper, he evoked his exciting war years spent serving the ideology of blood and soil, while both secretly looked at and twisted between their fingers their iron medals from Hitler, crosses of the second class, Ozols’ was a first lieutenant’s, KVK II (Kriegsverdienstkreuz), received on June 20, 1944, and Mazais’s was the one I had seen, for the infantry, DK II, of March 3, 1945. Since he knew that the circle around him could begin to tighten, Ozols fled to Australia. I don’t know in which camp Ozols and Mazais complained to one another of their bitter postwar fates, because there were many such refugee camps throughout Germany, in all three zones. Perhaps it was Wildflecken, because it was from there that many people went by train to Genoa, and from Genoa by the famous ship, Mozaffari, to Australia. On the list of passengers I find the happy little Ozols family, Kārlis, Erika and Vita — numbers 568, 569 and 570. In Australia, now tranquil, far away from his past, Ozols returns to chess and becomes the Australian champion. As soon as he reached Melbourne, the executions of Jews that Ozols carried out in 1
942 and 1943, some in the open, some in gas vans, with his team of a hundred or so fiery Latvian warriors, were no longer even a bad dream. Perhaps there was a small, pale reminder of the days of his youth in the occasional benign family association with Konrāds Kalējs, a Nazi collaborator from Arājs's units, pursued, but also never indicted as a war criminal. It is true that when he wasn’t playing chess, Ozols was fairly active in the Australian branch of the international organization Daugavas Vanagi, that is, in the branch of “The Hawks of the Daugava,” a branch which, from the 1950s on, boasted more than twelve hundred members, not to mention the other branches scattered throughout America and in almost all the countries and towns of Western Europe, in Sweden, Holland, Germany, and in South America — Brazil, Bolivia, Argentina and Uruguay — which former Latvian SS officers and collaborators joined, and who, those hawks, by their very name, even among those who have no clue about that organization, create an image of creepiness and mild horror when you imagine them flying in flocks over the great Daugava River in Latvia, aiming at the heads and eyes of the innocent. Today these hawks, falcons, whatever, have learned manners, and many of the original members of the organization no longer fly anywhere, because they are either senile or under the earth, and so the Daugavas Vanagi is engaged in good works, not exactly unpaid, given that its branches own restaurants and hotels, halls for this and halls for that, all at the disposal of newcomers — Latvians.
I have collected a longish list of those former Latvian SS collaborators, I have a heap of photographs in which they pose in military uniform with little black runes on their collars, in which, in work clothes, they smile as they dig their gardens or dandle their grandchildren on their knees, I have photographs of their weddings, but not one from a courtroom. I have studied their lives, their movements, their flights, and now I don’t know what to do with them. They’ve swarmed all over the place. For example, in 2007 it was believed that there were around a thousand war criminals living in Sweden, like rats they multiplied in silence, as one might say they keep a low profile, but they don’t hide, not at all, because Sweden says, The past is the past, and we have more important business, because Sweden, like Italy, has a law according to which crimes more than twenty-five years old cannot be processed through the courts.