by Daša Drndic
In their new homes, these placid people, former newcomers, do not change their names, they might sometimes adapt them a little to the language of the country that offers them refuge, not to stand out too much, they set up companies, concern themselves with property, and, every March 16, the Latvians visit their beloved Riga to pay their respects to their comrades, members of the Latvian legion, at the time a component of the Waffen-SS, founded by the direct command of Heinrich Himmler. Since 2000, the state of Latvia is no longer the patron of that pathetic mass gathering of jaded wrecks, with shuffling steps, bent backs, mouths full of false teeth, half-blind and maybe with diapers between their legs, but they will not give up their monstrous dream, because they come, they gather, they make their tearful speeches of reminiscence, while here and there past them, past that pathetic assemblage, walks the occasional leftover Jew, the occasional antifascist with a raised placard of protest, and one year a woman even dressed in the concentration camp prisoners’ uniform, the one with blue and white stripes, and she placed the appropriate cap on her head, and on her chest and back she attached the Star of David, but who gave a damn, the former Waffen-SS Latvian legionnaires simply glanced at her and said Some mad old biddy.
I haven’t a single photograph of Frida Landsberg. If I had, I would go from one to the other of the already-threadbare half-SS officers on my list and ask, Do you remember this girl?
I could start with Leila’s father, but he died. One of the people I put away at the bottom of a drawer must have seen Frida Landsberg, at least in passing, which, judging by how Marisa and Karlo spoke about her, would have been enough to remember her.
Here are some of those grotesque figures, from memory:
Aleksanders Plesners, head of the Latvian SS Legion. Never taken to court. Died.
Kārlis Lobe (1895–1985), organized the Riga police battalions and then became chief of police in Ventspils.
Arvīds Oše (1896–1989), actively involved in the persecution of Jews in Riga, worked in Sweden as a woodcutter, later in a glass factory. Active in that organization of Hawks.
Alfrēds Vadzemnieks, head of the Latvian security service in the region of Ventspils, and allegedly involved in killing civilians.
Boleslavs Maikovskis (1904–96), chief of the police station in Rēzekne. In the USA he worked as a carpenter. In Latvia, then the USSR, he was tried in absentia; he was condemned to death. When things got tough in America, he fled to Germany, where he died. Of old age. Before that he worked for the CIA. One of Hitler’s most active lackeys. For his dedication and devoted collaboration in “establishing the new European order,” the governor of the East Baltic region awarded him high offices and a collection of medals of the Third Reich. Thanks to him and his companions, who systematically terrorized the local population and sent five thousand people to German labor camps, more than fifteen thousand inhabitants of the Rēzeknes region were wiped from the face of the earth.
Kārlis Detlavs (1911–83), as a member of the Latvian auxiliary security police, killed Jews from the Riga ghetto. As an outcast — a displaced person — in 1946 he fled to America, where he was quickly accused of war crimes. The authorities initiated proceedings for his deportation to Riga, but, despite witnesses, the judges dealing with immigration issues systematically blocked the process, so Detlavs went nowhere. He died in his home in Baltimore.
Konrāds Kalējs (1913–2001), born in Riga, died in Melbourne. An officer in Arājs's death squads and guard-supervisor in the concentration camp Salaspils near Riga, where, it is now reliably known, he participated in the execution of inmates. When, in 1984, the judiciary of the United States, Canada, Great Britain and Australia finally decided to get a grip, Kalējs, thanks to the wealth he had amassed since the war, after numerous demands from various courts for his deportation from one country to another, flew from continent to continent, sometimes hiding, sometimes not, and generally pleading ignorance. On the little finger of his left hand he wore a signet ring, his status symbol. For his defense, Kalējs, who otherwise passed himself off as a farmer, but was in fact heavily involved in property, engaged a crowd of expensive lawyers, who croaked all over the place about the unheard-of shame, the heartless judiciary, witch-hunts, about a process that from America and Great Britain to Australia, from Australia to Canada, from Canada to Australia, and so on, sought the extradition of a sick, infirm, now already blind old man, oh, the heartlessness, and all this, they emphasized, without any justified reason. When the going got tougher, Kalējs suddenly became demented, with the additional diagnosis of prostate cancer, and soon after that died in Melbourne, in a Latvian old people’s home owned by those Hawks from the Latvian river Daugava, with an expression of bliss on his face, amidst urine and feces. It was confirmed, incontrovertibly confirmed, because some have nevertheless survived, that the Arājs Kommando, of which Konrāds Kalējs was a devoted and very active member, was responsible for the murder of half the almost eighty thousand Jews liquidated in Latvia, and above all in Riga, between August and December 1941. It is interesting that, even after achieving independence in 1991, Latvia did not prosecute a single one of “its own” Nazi collaborators, but it did pursue and punish several Russians for their anti-Nazi activities during the Second World War. At the urging of the Office for Special Investigations (OSI) of the United States Department of Justice, Latvia, in connection with the case of Konrāds Kalējs (and some other of its murderer-collaborators), affirmed unconvincingly that there was no convincing evidence for bringing charges against “our lads.” When, in 2000, under international pressure, Latvia did finally agree to cooperate in the case of Kalējs, Kalējs promptly died.
Boļeslavs Bogdanovs (1917–84) rampaged with Arājs's commandos, participated in the mass murder of a thousand civilians, among whom, in addition to Jews, there were communists, Roma and psychiatric patients. He entered the United States on the basis of a false statement about his past. The process of denaturalization began in 1983, but Bogdanovs died before the court judgment was known, and after he had been carrying out spying assignments for the CIA for several years.
Valdis Didrichsons (1913–95), also a member of Arājs's legion, based in Riga. In 1988, forty years late, for which there is a valid although until recently confidential reason, the US government began proceedings of denaturalization, which it completed in 1990 when Didrichsons was ready to renounce his American citizenship. In view of his poor state of health, the authorities abandoned their decision to deport him.
There are dozens of them in the United States from Latvia alone (not to mention other countries), those peaceful citizens, former murderers with a distorted, hard East-European or German accent, who manage pistols and kama knives perfectly, who for sixty and more years stand up obediently when the American anthem is played, who vote, who have hobbies, who go to the countryside, who pay taxes and have children, who gather in their national clubs of still-dubious political orientation, in which they eat their national dishes (which, unlike their own past, they don’t forget), who, although proclaimed war criminals, are never tried or deported, and who because of old age and illness gradually drift away, which does not always mean that the air around them is cleared. Because although their children know or don’t know, ask or don’t ask, the possibility exists that some hidden seed of their habitus should germinate, just as recently, quite incomprehensibly and inexplicably, among the bricks beneath my window, after two years a little plant sprouted when I had thought the north wind, cold and drought had put paid to it forever. That little plant is important to me, I watch it grow, I fear for its life, and when the weather turns cold or when that hideous, merciless wind gets up, I open the window and protect it with my hands, bringing it the little bit of residual warmth that used once to run through me, because it, that plant, which sometimes even flowers, seems to grow out of my skull, then it abandons me, turns toward the dilapidated façades opposite and throws onto them a fine light that flickers even when dense darkn
ess descends.
As long as the Cold War lasted, those criminals were necessary to the USA, and the USA exploited them to the hilt. The arm of the CIA is long and its fingers wrap around our planet, it believes it holds it in its hand like a little ball. When the Cold War ends, these criminals are old, dispensable, but under oath of secrecy, that is, blackmailed that if they squeal, they’ll be deported to the USSR, they become harmless and may continue to cultivate their American, Swedish, Finnish, German, etc. gardens in which they bury their filthy Nazi past. Around that buried past now, when (some) CIA dossiers have been declassified, the contaminated soil radiates, and beneath it nestle small, barely visible landmines.
Here they are, some Latvians, spies for the CIA:
Edgars Inde (1909–80), member of Arājs's death squads, assisted the Nazis in the persecution and killing of thousands of Jews and other civilians from 1941 to 1942, never prosecuted, never condemned, his life warehoused in the Central Intelligence Agency.
Tālivaldis Karklins (1914–83), as a member of the Latvian district police participated in two mass executions of his fellow countrymen, Jews and Soviet activists.
Juris Kauls (1912–2008), deputy commander of a concentration camp near Riga, so a Nazi collaborator, in the United States a tax adviser, after a process of denaturalization is set in motion, flees from the USA in 1988 to West Germany. Dies in Latvia.
Miķelis Kiršteins (1916–94), also a member of Arājs's death units. A process of denaturalization is initiated in 1987 and completed in 1991. Kiršteins renounces American citizenship, and as a reward the authorities (the CIA) do not deport him.
Edgars Laipenieks (1913–98), athlete, represents Latvia at the Olympics in Berlin in 1936. Then, still in good shape, as a member of the Latvian political police, first persecutes Jews and communists, then tortures and kills them. The United States Department of Justice initiates a process of deportation, the CIA intervenes, and one of its officials addresses the spy Laipenieks in a letter, with the intimate Dear Ed, apologizes for the awkwardness of the American justice system wandering a little off limits and assures him that everything will be OK, you will stay. Laipenieks’s CIA cryptonym is AESIDECAR-2, and he is included in the project AEBALCONY which uses American citizens with a fluent knowledge of Baltic languages for “legal” operations in Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia.
These CIA spies from Latvia are two a penny:
Waffen-Obersturmführer Pēteris Janelsiņš, member of the SS Latvian auxiliary police that carries out mass killings. CIA cryptonym: AEMARSH-15, in the project AEMARS.
Herberts Žagars, cryptonym AEMARSH-1, alias Herbert Kalniņš, in the Latvian legion from 1943 to 1944.
Elmārs Sproģis (1914–91), assistant chief of police in Gulbene, in the uniform of the Waffen-SS accompanies around 150 Jews to execution sites and observes their execution, with his pockets full of jewels and money previously taken from them.
The Nazi collaborator Freds Launags (1919–91), a lively spy, a fairly active errand boy — until he is pronounced (by other spies) unreliable, in fact mentally ill, so the CIA dump him unceremoniously. Launags had three cryptonyms in three separate projects: AECAMBARO-1, AEHAWKEYE-1 and iCAMBARO-1, and three pseudonyms: Cleveland O. Hahn, Louis G. Goltedge and Raymond S. Churgin.
*
I came across all this human dross, the names and lives of already deceased, spinelessly loyal humanoid lice as I was trying to find any kind of information about the life of Leila’s father, Arvīds Mazais, in the hope of discovering at least something about the disappearance of Frida Landsberg, that love of my uncle Karlo Osterman, cancelled by war. I read the facsimiles of several hundred declassified CIA documents, astounded by the perfectionism of their “research” team. Apart from the fact that the CIA had an insight into the smallest details of the past and present lives of those it intended to woo, from the date and place of their birth, from all the addresses at which they had lived, from their married and unmarried partners and their biographies, from the everyday habits and affinities of their future yes-men — what they read, what they ate, whether they smoked and if so, how much, whether they drank and if so, what and how much, how they spent their free time, from which restaurants they frequented to what kind of clothes and hats they wore, what color their eyes were, how high and heavy they and those closest to them were, those reports at times acquired the form of little literary works shot through with a lyrical-sentimental note, a charming modesty. So, as though I was watching a horror film, I saw the faces of those Latvian criminals, I followed their footsteps, listened to their commands, was present at their drinking bouts, their thieving, and I watched their killings, massacres and organized executions. I pronounced their to me complicated names out loud while they burned down first synagogues, then people, in the thousands, and when that wasn’t enough for them, they shot them in the back of the head, and in order to save space, they later arranged them neatly in pits, the way sardines are placed in tins. Seventy thousand (70,000) souls. Thanks to the declassified CIA documents these assiduous Nazi aides rose from the dead, flew into my current life, lithe, hale, young and handsome, belted into their uniforms with the Waffen-SS insignia on their chests and collars, and set off on their bestial campaign.
It was Hāzners, Vilis Hāzners, who brought me to Arvīds Mazais. I had hoped that Arvīds Mazais, now already a dead man with Hitler’s medal hidden in the bottom of a cardboard box, a man with whom long ago in the Bavarian backwoods I had played chess, might indirectly, through the only accessible living person connected with him, his daughter Leila, explain how and why Frida Landsberg disappeared. But, Leila Mazais had no idea about anything, or, if she did, her ideas were mixed up. Had I thought of researching all of this earlier, in fact, had Leila hopped back into my life sooner, of which there was no chance as I had fled from her horrified and afraid, and, presumably thinking that nothing mattered anymore, she had reappeared old and fat and constantly drunk, and I had had my own tribulations, my own deaths, my own solitudes, my own wanderings through the world, my own illnesses, and had this all happened forty years before, or at least when I was in Paris thirty-seven years ago with my terminally ill mother Marisa, who, although full of poisonous experimental cytostatics, was fully aware, or had I once, when I had scarpered off to Canada twenty years before, with no work, and with national-fascism knocking on my door every day with the intention of getting me into bed, and had I there asked the chess player Miervaldis Walter Jurševskis, although he was in Vancouver and I was in Toronto, but he had hung around the Academy of Art in Riga, and perhaps also around the Riga Conservatoire so he might have met Frida Landsberg, because he did not leave Latvia until 1945, when some of the horrors, the most appalling, had already passed, and because he had moved around Germany for several years from one camp for displaced persons to another and because, I know, he had played chess with that criminal Ozols, and the Nazi-fan Bogolyubov, I don’t know and don’t wish to know what Jurševskis was doing during the war in Riga, where he had been born in 1921, I just recently discovered how much he liked art, bowls, yoga, golf, he liked dancing and traveling round the world, he liked seafood and candlelit dinners although none of that is a guarantee of ethical behavior, but rather confirmation that this Jurševskis lived well, partly from his rapid-transit chess games, partly from drawing advertisements for the Eaton Company, partly from restoring antique furniture, had I at least asked him — but it’s too late now, because Miervaldis Jurševskis died in 2014, precisely twelve months before the moment when I am writing this.
Vilis Hāzners was born in Latvia in 1905, and died in 1989 in America, never having become its citizen. In 1977 the American authorities initiated a process for his denaturalization, but the OSI — Office for Special Investigations at the Department of Justice — (under pressure from the CIA) quashed the request and Hāzners closed his eyes, with the blessing of the Church and those closest to him. At the court case, evidence did not help, wit
ness statements did not help, Hāzners was protected.
Vilis Hāzners, Waffen-Sturmbannführer (i.e., major), proud owner of four Hitler crosses, was accused of participation in the liquidation of thirty thousand Latvian Jews and, specifically, for leading crazed Nazi scumbags, gangsters and thugs who, on July 4, 1941, set fire to Riga’s Great Synagogue at 25 Gogola iela, having first imprisoned twenty people in its cellar. Later, with his crony, that pilot Herberts Cukurs, Vilis Hāzners watched the synagogue burning from 63 Stabu iela, not five hundred meters, a six-minute walk away from the building in which Frida Landsberg was still living with her parents, and the small Landsberg family watched the smoke from behind closed slats, trembling. My uncle Karlo Osterman was there as well. His arms round Frida Landsberg, he stood behind her and whispered into her neck, Come with me, I can save you. The situation was clear to Karlo Osterman, for Karlo Osterman it was a reprise, racial laws in Croatia had been in force for more than two months, they were established quickly, perfected, except that the Croatian synagogues would begin to burn somewhat later than these Latvian ones. The Landsbergs were spared then, the rampaging scum of of Arājs's commandos did not come to their door, having collected from the neighboring buildings enough victims to burn — some thirty of them. Witnesses described the people locked in, like burning flares, breaking windows and trying to flee, while Cukurs waited for them outside and practiced shooting at living targets. Then the synagogue at 50 Maskavas iela was burned down as well.