by Daša Drndic
The CIA did not declassify files that confirmed its use of former Nazis and Nazi collaborators — immigrants for its own spying — just like that. And it declassified more than a million digitalized documents, inaccessible until then. When the CIA “knuckled under” and gave in, after lengthy pressure from the legal institutions of government, and then not until 2006, it became clear that this had been a calculated program on a large scale, established immediately after the end of the Second World War. And so for decades the CIA received into its protective embrace Nazis and their standard-bearers, who were fleeing from the not exactly firm hand of justice, believing that it was protecting the world from future evil. Now that piece of theater is at an end. The Nazis of the time are on the whole dead, although some lived astonishingly long. But the secret services always have work to do. And when they don’t, they invent it.
For years the United States Department of Justice researched the work of the CIA, and in 2006, on six hundred and twelve (612) pages, it completed its (of course) secret report. That document would no doubt have remained buried in some well-protected safe had it not been unearthed in 2010 by journalists from The New York Times and submitted to the public. Good, we know that both the CIA and the “democratic” authorities of the USA recruited notorious Nazi criminals in the interest of the altruistic advancement of humanity, but the scale of those actions and the number of lies connected with them were beyond imagining. That is how I came to Vilis Hāzners, alias Victor Halfond, and through him to Leila’s father Arvīds Mazais.
Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty proved to be a convenient niche for a certain number of war (Nazi) criminals. Both stations, set up in 1950 and 1953 respectively, were financed by the CIA and as well as the United States (Voice of America), they had editorial offices throughout Western Europe. While Radio Free Europe directed its programmatic propaganda toward the satellite states of the USSR, but also toward Yugoslavia, Radio Liberty was aimed at the Soviet Union. That was where “our” Vilis Hāzners made his nest, participating in the AEFLAG, AEBALCONY and AECOB projects, with the cryptonym AEKILO-2, and all under the supervision of the CIA. The task of AECOB was to infiltrate Soviet Latvia and its surroundings. According to available information, Hāzners was still broadcasting his contributions on Radio Liberty in the 1980s. I found a document in which Hāzners recommends Arvīds Mazais to his bosses as a contributor to RFE/RL, quoting details about his life, his address in Germany, his marital status and number of children, his employment and war journey. I cannot show that document here, because Leila and her brothers could sue me, the way a member of a Jewish family attacked me when I suggested that some of its members had also been collaborator members of the great Aryan family of Fascists and Nazis during the Second World War. I cannot risk directly exposing the evidence, because I don’t have money for lawyers, I’m already involved in three court cases, which further annoys me and depletes my resources.
Hāzners’s reports clarified the meaning of Mazais’s SS medal. So, Lieutenant Arvīds Mazais was a member of the Latvian SS Legion, its 19th infantry division, a hot-blooded, voluntary patriotic formation founded on Himmler’s unconditional command. Exceptionally impressed by the fighting activities of the Latvian SS Legion, in 1943 Himmler founded within it a special bomber unit, the 19th Waffen-SS Grenadiers Division. Its task was to throw grenades at people, especially communists, but also at buildings. The very thought of communists, generally speaking, probably made the hair on Arvīds Mazais’s head stand on end, although none of his family had perished in either the gulags or the prisons of the NKVD. So, Arvīds Mazais was a fairly hotheaded, fiery and vehement man. When I met him, he seemed tame, not at all bombastic. His only obvious passions were gardening and chess, which are seen as harmless, tame passions. Korchnoi stated somewhere that no chess grandmaster is normal, “Chess players only differ in the degree of their madness,” he said. It’s not important now where and how Arvīds Mazais fought, it’s not important whether his fascism was great or small, it existed, his hatred, mild or fierce, existed. But, today it is known that the people recruited to the 19th Waffen-SS Grenadiers Division were members of the notorious Latvian SS Division who had previously actively participated in the mass liquidation of Jews. And it is known, it can be seen, that there are still a considerable number of Latvians who consider those fighters of Himmler’s heroes.
Today Arvīds Mazais’s children go to Latvia and read books about the heroes, the knights of their country, about the fighters for a free homeland, those with SS insignia on their chests and collars: the image of the little badge on their uniforms. Today, Leila has her own box in the national theater in Riga, and on the door of that box there is a brass plaque with her name on it. I think that it was bought, that box and that plaque, that it was some kind of donation for the promotion of dance and dancing in general. Because all Leila ever did in her life was dance, and when one dances it’s impossible to speak, one just listens to the music and dances. In that theater there is no plaque with the name of Frida Landsberg’s famous teacher, Adolphe Metz, nor of the great Latvian pianist Katya Abramis (35), because there are none of their violins, nor their pianos, nor their graves, and so none of them either. Perhaps the occasional not yet disintegrated bone deep in the earth, in one of the fifty-five (55) mass graves there in the beautiful Rumbula forest within easy reach of Riga, from which cries still break the silence of the night.
That volunteer 19th Latvian SS division, founded by order of Hitler and the command of Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler, in which Arvīds Mazais also fought, included recruits from among members of Arājs's cutthroats. In 1944 and 1945, all these volunteers attacked the invading troops of the Red Army so intrepidly, fearlessly and unwaveringly that Hitler presented them with more medals than any other non-German Waffen-SS formation. By July 1, 1944, the Latvian legion numbered 87,550 fighters, with a further 23,000 “assistants” in the structure of the Werhmacht. If Arvīds only became “active” in 1943, maybe he has no connection with the disappearance of Frida Landsberg. How could that be? He lived in Riga. He watched, he listened to what was going on. He was against the communists, and officially, all Latvian Jews were proclaimed communist lackeys and traitors of Greater Germany, therefore also of Latvia. The scum.
So, my uncle Karlo Osterman arrived in Riga for the second time at the end of June 1941. The Russians had gone, the Nazis had arrived, rampaging and armed Latvian youths were breaking into apartments and arresting people, there were bodies in the street. In the first days of July, Jews had their telephone lines cut. Go, Frida Landsberg said to Karlo Osterman, I’ll write, she said. I can’t go with you now, I just can’t. That letter of Frida’s, dated November 3, 1941, reached Split, and from Split, according to Grandma Ana’s account, it was sent to Zagreb by lame Marko, who could not join the partisans because of his leg and who, on that famous sunny June 3, 1944, full of good cheer, bought the first cherries at the improvised market near St Dominius’s, and then the shards of Allied bombs fell on him, the cherries flew into the air like drops of blood and lame Marko, his wide-open eyes staring at the sky, lay dead among all that debris.
That letter of Frida’s reached Karlo at the end of December 1941. That was the letter which my grandmother Ana gave me thirty years later and which, of course, got lost, and then, like that Ustasha pass, miraculously resurfaced, written in rudimentary French and glowing with a simple, almost childish language; there is not much emotion in it, it contains mostly facts, in it Frida says that now they’ve all been moved out, they no longer live in Stabu iela, but in Maskavas iela, in one room, and they will soon be going east, and she says that her professor Metz lives in the same building, He’s got his violin, writes Frida, mine was bought by a German, Rosenberg. Frida also mentions her friend and colleague Sara Rašin, already a famous violinist, born at roughly the same time as her, Frida, in 1920, and also a student of Professor Metz, She’s with us as well, Frida writes and reminds Karlo of an improvised concert
which she and Sara gave in that gallery, you know, when you were here last year.
Frida also writes that sometimes, in the basement of the building where they are now living, which has guards and which is, you know, blocked, Professor Metz and Sara Rašin put on little concerts for the people who live there, they play simple melodies, and Sara often plays the “Spanish dance” from the opera La vida breve by Manuel de Falla, and every time the professor asks his basement audience not to applaud at the end, No applause, please, no applause, he says and, Frida also writes, Professor Metz and Sara sometimes lend her their violins, so that she too plays sometimes and that then she thinks of him, Karlo, and the way he kissed that little red star on her neck, which now, his little star, is becoming ever paler, it is vanishing, because she, Frida, no longer practices, because that Rosenberg now has her violin. At the end, Frida says that every morning she goes to a field, that she digs the earth and her fingers are already stiff, but that when she gets a new violin, everything will be all right again, that they are going to the east from where she will write to him, Karlo, again, because she cannot, she will not believe Manuel de Falla that life really is short. That letter, a note in fact, is written in pencil, and as I read it, the letters in it are barely visible and the little note ends Ta petite Frida.
How did Frida Landsberg disappear?
Singing. To a melody she played in her head.
There are a lot of violin stories, and musical ones in general from the Second World War. Some of them are Croatian. Some are hideous, some are sad. That struck me as interesting, that quality of tenderness among criminals. That need for incomprehensible solace among victims. I met Dušan Šarotar from Murska Sobota. In his novel Billiards at Hotel Dobray he writes about a violin which now hangs above his desk, which is no longer played, but he talks about the violin as belonging to his grandfather, who was the only one of the family to come home from Auschwitz, on foot.
In the middle of August 1941, in Riga, on Maskavas iela, preparations began for the opening of a ghetto, which was to be completely enclosed, fenced in with barbed wire and guarded by the local police. In October, thirty thousand people were herded into that ghetto, but as early as September the Einsatzkommandos in both small and larger Latvian towns had succeeded in killing thirty thousand Jews. The mass killings in Latvia had begun in July, when my uncle Karlo was back in Riga, when he realized that incomprehensible horrors were on their way and when he said to Frida, Come away with me.
The first mass killings of the Jews and non-Jews of Riga began already at the beginning of July 1941. In just seven days Nazis took four thousand (4,000) people by truck from the Central Prison to the beautiful forest of Biķernieki, not four kilometers from the center of town, where they immediately shot them. That practice continued until 1944. Today it is known that there, in the forest of Biķernieki, lie the remains of thirty-five thousand people, some Latvians, some West European Jews, some Soviet prisoners of war, some political opponents of the Nazi regime. Before Latvia erected a memorial in 2001 in the forest of Biķernieki, which was in fact built and financed by the German Republic, the government opened fifty-five mass graves and began to compose a list of those killed, but this list of those killed in the forest of Biķernieki does not include Frida Landsberg, nor her mother Sonja, nor her father Benzon, nor Professor Metz nor Sara Rašin. That memorial in the forest of Biķernieki is surrounded by gentle hills to which nowadays picnickers come in spring and in winter skiers. Like Zagreb’s Sljeme.
In October the ghetto in Maskavas iela is ready. Latvian police raid apartments and drag the population of Riga by force into that enormous pen in the center of town. The Nazi authorities immediately confiscate the entire property of the newly imprisoned, both the moveable and immoveable. In the column heading toward Maskvas iela, carrying their bundles, trudges the little Landsberg family. Sonja Landsberg stares at the ground, Benzon Landsberg passes his former shoe shop and turns away his head, Frida walks with her arms crossed on her chest, clutching a dozen sheets of music, which the Latvian police soon take from her and burn on the spot. In November and December the Nazi authorities plan to disperse these people a little further away, to the east, so that, starving and robbed, they should not disturb the carefree, smooth-running lives of the other people in the city. But, at the end of October 1941, Himmler sends SS-Obergruppenführer Friedrich Jeckeln to Riga and the planned dispersal comes to nothing, if it ever existed. Himmler orders Jeckeln, commander and chief of police of the whole occupied region of Soviet Russia, to eliminate the inhabitants of the ghetto in the shortest time. Jeckeln applies himself to the task: he assembles and stockpiles ammunition, compiles a schedule, that is, a timetable of “events” and recruits seventeen hundred German and Latvian soldiers, policemen and civil guards who are to put his commands into practice. Then Jeckeln sets about looking for a suitable location and in a nearby wood, just beside the small railway station of Rumbula, he sees, Oh, a favorable terrain, perfection, a fine open space surrounded by pines, with beautiful birch trees all around, my enchanting Birkenau in the little birchwood of Birkenwald, that’s it! Jeckeln, the lover of birch trees, smiles, and employs three hundred Russian prisoners of war to dig pits under the strict supervision of the Germans and Latvians. The soil is damp and sandy, so although it is the end of November and the temperatures drop to -7° Celsius, the Russian prisoners dig by night and day and in record time succeed in digging six three-meter-deep and ten-meter-square pits, in which they themselves will end their days. Jeckeln engages a thousand guards and they will accompany the column of those condemned to death the ten kilometers to the killing field, to the clearing on the edge of the Rumbula wood, known also as Vārnu mežs, Raven Wood, a wood in which not only do the leaves rustle and the pine branches sway, but a wood out of which come the cries of those intelligent birds, known to be able to foretell danger, the black cries of those black birds break through, like an echo, a refrain, a response to the laments and pleas of a different species, human. Evildoers generally love thickets, scrub and brush, and that is why they make their camps and dig their graves there, because that is where nature is untouched, quiet. They forget that forests have ears, and fields eyes, that nature is constantly awake.
Jeckeln ordered the guards to ensure that no one stepped out of the column, that no one tried to escape, In which case, feel free to shoot, commanded General Jeckeln, but immediately remove the bodies so as not to create disorder. Three hundred (out of fifteen hundred) of Arājs's commandos immediately made themselves available, We are ready, we are armed, my commandos and I are ready to defend our homeland from Jews and communists, those shameless, eternal enemies of our wonderful country, Latvia, yells Viktors Arājs, probably downing a toast in a tavern with his cronies and fellow murderers, Herberts Cukurs and Kārlis Ozols.
On November 27, 1941, from Berlin-Grunewald Station, train number Da 31 set out for Riga. Three days later, the train containing 1,053 Jews arrived at Šķirotava Station, a few hundred meters from the killing field in Rumbula wood. The ghetto in Maskavas iela was bursting at the seams because the “dispersal” of its inhabitants was to begin a few hours later, so all the travelers on train Da 31 were immediately taken to the killing field, where they were executed in short order. The pits began to fill.
At 4 a.m. on November 30, 1941, the German police, Arājs’s commandos and eighty local guards began to wake the inhabitants of the ghetto with shouts and threats, giving them half an hour “to get ready.” Great urgency reigned. The guards cut the barbed-wire fence to speed up the departure of people from the ghetto and organized a column for the journey to Rumbula. Those who refused to leave got a bullet in the forehead. By noon, in rooms, on steps, on the road, lay around seven hundred dead. At 6 a.m., the first column of a thousand people set off for Rumbula. The action began three hours later. Accompanied by the whistle of whips, groups of around fifty were ordered to undress, some remained in their underwear, others were naked, it was cold, people
were shivering. Their clothes, gold, money and jewelry were all immediately sorted for transport to Berlin, in trains which were otherwise returning empty to the Reich. Then came the order, The first fifty into the pit! The people went down and lay on their stomachs on top of the previously liquidated bodies. One bullet in the back of the head was enough, contingent after contingent was “dealt with.” The three pits filled simultaneously. SS-Obergruppenführer Friedrich Jeckeln stood to one side, satisfied with the way things were going, proud of his “undertaking,” of his system of effective liquidation that meant a significant saving of ammunition, but also of space, proud of his Sardinenpackung. Jeckeln walked along the pits, supervising the “process,” at times contentedly exclaiming, Ja, Ordnung muss sein! and here and there taking the occasional photograph, so that it should be known, should be seen, to show Himmler how this was done, to send proof that would bring him another decoration, another iron medal.
A week later, on December 8, 1941, on the plateau outside Rumbula wood, the second wave of Jeckeln’s self-burial, or Sardinenpackung, took place. In those two daylong actions, Jeckeln’s boys managed to “pack” into three pits twenty-five thousand people.
Trains from the countries under Hitler’s occupation continued to arrive regularly in Latvia. I have information about a hundred and thirty (130) trains with roughly a thousand “passengers” in each, I have information about the date and place of their departure and arrival, about the number of children and their ages, about the number of women and men and about the number who died on the journey. If I start listing it, someone might think that I am obsessed, ask why I have got so stuck, and say that that does not belong in literature, that those are nothing but the most ordinary defamatory scribblings. So I won’t list anything so as not to upset potential readers. Just this: the passengers in those trains were Germans, Austrians, Poles, Czechs, Hungarians, Jews and Roma, political prisoners, homosexuals, psychiatric patients, and so on, a familiar story of horror, one hundred and thirty thousand (130,000) souls. Given that the pits in Rumbula were already full to the brim, and the Riga ghetto closed, or rather “cleansed,” because there was no longer any “material” in it, the new arrivals were directed to Kaiserwald concentration camp, on the outskirts of Riga, and Salaspils concentration camp was also opened at the end of 1941, eighteen kilometers southeast of the capital. In order to destroy evidence of the mass liquidations of the innocent, in 1944 the Nazis forced the inmates of Kaiserwald camp to open up the pits in Rumbula and burn the already well-decomposed bodies. Then they liquidated those prisoners as well, thousands of them. The few survivors of Kaiserwald were then transferred to the Nazi Stutthof concentration camp, also situated in a damp, dark wood in reach of Sztutowo, some thirty kilometers east of Gdańsk. When, on October 13, 1944, the Red Army entered Riga, it found fewer than a thousand Jews there. Already by the beginning of 1942, Jeckeln had succeeded in reducing the number of Riga Jews from 29,500 to 2,600. According to the census of the population of 1935, 93,479 Jews lived in Latvia, forty thousand of them in Riga. According to accessible data, around seventy thousand Latvian Jews disappeared in the Holocaust. Apart from the massacre in Riga, that is in Rumbula, terrible, numerous and mass liquidations were carried out in Liepāja and in Daugavpils, also in the open, in winter and summer, on beaches, in squares, in parks, in prisons and in ghettos. Even today efforts are still being made to compile lists of the disappeared, but since whole families perished with their neighbors and friends, few have survived to be asked, to bear witness, to grieve. And so, the majority of those killed in Rumbula are nameless to this day. That is why there is no evidence about the disappearance of Frida Landsberg, only guesses. I found lists of people who, after the capitulation of Germany, made their way in fishing boats, ships, trains and some on foot, to Sweden and Germany and then to Australia, America, Canada and so on, as far away as possible. Frida Landsberg is not among them either, because those who fled were those who had bloodied their hands, and those who had thrown flowers onto the Nazi tanks, and then those who had later seen the light and those afraid of the Soviets. After the war, Jews mostly did not flee, because mostly they no longer existed. Those Jews who did succeed in fleeing had fled earlier, when Latvia was free and independent, but then there had been no reason to flee, so, again, they did not leave. Those roughly one hundred and thirty thousand who fled before the Russians invaded a second time never returned to Latvia, because they died waiting for the Soviets to stop embracing their country. Now their children and their grandchildren go to Latvia, baffled and broken. After the Second World War little Latvia was left without a third of its population. Today Latvia is crisscrossed with memorials and ardently developing tourism, which is officially called dark tourism. This is when people from the West visit killing fields en masse, clutch their hearts and exclaim Oh my God, unbelievable! Incroyable! Nicht zu fassen! then they go to dinner in some traditional restaurant to sample national specialties. To feel the pulse of the country they are visiting. Latvia has a lot of forests.