Speech by Edward Anders at
Dedication of Liepāja Holocaust Memorial
Liepāja, 9 June 2004
Your
excellencies Ambassador Herold, Ambassador Carlson, Ambassador Koren,
Ambassador Hĺkanson, Col. Grant, Dr. Zunda, Consul Semyonov, ladies and
gentlemen:
We have come
here to honor the 6400 Liepāja Jews who died in Hitler’s
Holocaust and in Stalin’s Gulag. But we also want to honor the 200
survivors and those brave Latvians and Germans who saved 33 of them.
Lastly, we
want to thank the Soviet, British, and American armies that liberated the rest.
First, the
victims. Ninety percent of them were shot in 1941, in or near Liepāja.
First the men were killed, then old people, and finally women and
children. At
the largest mass execution, in mid-December 1941, the
SS-man Sobeck took pictures, showing the victims a few
minutes or seconds before death.
What is
striking is the extraordinary composure of most victims. They heard the
shots,
they saw the victims fall, and yet they calmly went to their death.
Many victims
had known for days that their end was near and they pleaded, „Do not
forget
us!“ Perhaps they were thinking of the Talmud passage, „A person is not
truly
dead until his name has been forgotten“. Today we are finally
fulfilling the
victims‘ last request by bringing their names back to this cemetery. It
would
have been their final resting place if there had been no war. We cannot
bring
back their ashes from the mass graves. But we have made a symbolic
attempt, by
placing a container of sand from the Šķēde dunes at the foot of the
wall. It should contain at least a few atoms of each victim.
Next, the
survivors, of whom at least 11 are here today. At the end of 1941,
about 1000
were still alive. They did not know what terrible ordeals were still
ahead of
them in the next 40 months. Life in the Liepāja ghetto was hard. But in
October 1943, when the last 800 were deported to the Kaiserwald
concentration
camp, they found new levels of cruelty, as well as „selections“.
Children under
12 were sent to Auschwitz for gassing, and their mothers had the
heartbreaking
choice of abandoning their children or dying with them. Most chose
death.
Only 350
Liepāja Jews were still alive in August 1944 when deportations to the
Stutthof camp began. Conditions in that camp were dreadful. Although
only the
young and strong had been sent there, half of them died: in the camp,
on death
marches, or on barges that took them westward in the last days of the
war. Only
176 survived. They rebuilt their lives after liberation, but their
physical and
emotional suffering has left deep scars.
Lastly, the
rescuers. Regrettably, a few thousand Latvians had become accomplices
in the
Holocaust. Some arrested Jews and took them to the execution sites.
Others shot
them. But there also were hundreds of Latvians who rescued Jews by
hiding them,
and thousands more who quietly helped them with food, etc. Some of them
lost
their lives for their good deeds. On the Wall, you will find the names
of 44 of
these brave Latvians, and also of two German officers. Together they
saved 33
Jews in Liepāja. We are honored to have here Indra Sedula, Irida
Paškus,
and Teodors Eniņš. The ladies are the daughters of Roberts and Johanna
Seduls, who hid 11 Jews in their cellar for nearly 2 years. Dr. Eniņš
is
the grandson of Grieta Eniņš, who, with the help of her 2 sons, hid 2
Jewish boys for nearly 3 years.
Along with the
rescuers, we want to honor the liberators. The Soviet Army had the
largest role
in defeating Nazi Germany, and it liberated the greatest number of
Latvian
Jews. Others were liberated by the British and American armies. In the
name of
the survivors, I express our deep gratitude to the diplomats of Russia,
Britain, and the US for the great sacrifices their countries made in
defeating
the Hitler regime. I also commend the governments of Germany and Latvia
for
their efforts to reexamine the past and to heal the wounds of WWII. The
damage
cannot be undone and the crimes cannot be forgotten. But 3 generations
have
been born since WWII. So let us work in friendship with them in
building a
peaceful world. Together, let us try to understand how to prevent
dictatorships, wars, and genocide.