The Shkeede dunes, where mass executions took place from October 1941 to spring of 1945, were a closed military area during the Soviet occupation, 1945–1991. When they finally became open to the public in the early 1990s, the mass graves were no longer recognizable from the ground.
In 2004/2005, when the Foundation Liepaaja Jewish Heritage, or LJH (Sergey Zaharjin, Ilya Segal, Ilana Ivanova) began planning the big Shkeede memorial, one of us (EA) urged them to look for the mass graves, and suggested 4 methods for locating them. However, LJH declined to do so, claiming that the graves had been washed out to sea during a big storm in the 1950s that eroded the coast by 100–150 m. That seemed very unlikely, as the beach at Liepaaja is exactly where it was in the 1930s and 1940s. The 1930–1988 maps in various archives also showed no evidence of such erosion. There exist nearly 7 million wartime German aerial photographs in UK and US archives, including more than 1000 of the Liepaaja area, but all efforts to obtain them were unsuccessful.
EA therefore obtained a photo of the Shkeede area taken in April 2003 by the US satellite Quickbird (Pict. 1). It shows a dark straight line (AE) 270 m long, close to and parallel to the coast. The location agrees with pictures of the Shkeede executions on 15 December 1941 as well as war crimes trial records, and the length agrees almost exactly with the dimensions 265 x 8 m reported by the Extraordinary Commission in 1945. Only 4 years later did we learn that the Russian State Archives in Moscow had the Commission’s maps of Shkeede (Pict. 2) and 2 other Liepaaja murder sites.
The grave is almost impossible to recognize from the ground, but EA measured the exact distances and directions from the satellite photo and gave them to the Liepaaja geodesist Ints Liepinsh, who was able to find the grave without difficulty (Pict. 3, 4, 5).
In January 2006 we asked the Mayor of Liepaaja for permission to build a memorial plaque at the mass grave and to landscape the area. We hoped that survivors would then be able to walk up right to the edge of the grave—a deeply moving experience. However, the grave is on one of the „gray dunes“, which are very fragile and under strict environmental protection. Thus a raised wooden walkway would have to be built for visitors to prevent damage to the dunes. Under Latvian law, the walkway must be wide enough for wheelchairs, which would raise the cost even further beyond our means. Perhaps some wealthy donor will take over.
The City proposed a less expensive solution: to set up a memorial plaque at the road fork between the old (Soviet obelisk) and new Shkeede monuments (giant menorah). Indeed, in 2005 a number of Libau Jews had written to Mayor Sesks, urging him to ensure that the new monument acknowledge all victims murdered at Shkeede: Jews, Soviet POWs, and Latvians. The City agreed, assigned a special place for such a stone, and required LJH to install it, in return for permission to build the new monument.
But LJH, shirking its obligation, never installed it. We and many fellow Liepaaja Jewss do not understand the mentality of people who refuse to honor non-Jewish victims—including rescuers of Jews and Soviet POWs—who opposed the Nazis and were killed by them. We have therefore paid for the memorial plaque ourselves. The text, as approved by the City, is shown in Pict. 6. The plaque, installed on 27.10.06, is shown in Pict. 7.
Ilana Ivanova, unwilling to face the fact that 3000+ non-Jews were killed at Shkeede, angrily complained to one of us (VB) about our memorial plaque. In her view, Shkeede is an exclusively Jewish killing field, not to be defiled by mention of non-Jewish victims. But she held her fire for 3 years. Then, in August 2009, word reached us of a novel form of vandalism: our plaque had been camouflaged by a dense belt of young pines, obscuring the reference to non-Jewish victims (Pict. 8). The technique used here is a wonderfully gentle addition to the arsenal of vandalism, using shrubs instead of spray paint, sledge hammers, or explosives. However, the City considers such plantings unlawful and is removing them.
In a newspaper story (Latvijas Aviize, 7 Oct 2009), both Ilana Ivanova and Naum Vorobeichik, chairman of the Liepaaja Jewish Community, say that they were “angry” about the placement of our plaque “right on the access path to the Menorah”. The latter also admits that the shrubs may have been planted by a local Jew. Yes, but the path forks at this point, the other branch going to the Soviet obelisk from the 1960s. Jews have long complained about Soviet Holocaust denial, referring to victims only as “peaceful Soviet citizens” without mentioning that many of them were Jews. Surely the obelisk needs the clarification provided by our plaque, but so does the Menorah, which mentions only Jews. It is sad beyond words that a woman, both of whose parents were saved by a brave Latvian couple and were liberated by the Red Army, gets “angry” about a small plaque honoring anti-Nazi Latvians and Russians lying in the same mass grave as Jews.
Edward Anders and Vladimir Ban, October 2009