Mass
Graves and a Memorial at
Shkeede
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 Libau
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
Libau
is exactly where it
was in the 1930s and 1940s. The 1930–1988 maps in various archives also
showed no sign of such erosion. We hoped to get more information from
the
nearly 7 million wartime German aerial photographs in UK and US
archives,
including more than 1000 of the Libau 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. 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. 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 Liepāja
geodesist
Ints Liepiņš, who was able to
find the grave without
difficulty. Several of his photos are shown in Pictures 2,
3,
and 4.
In January
2006 we asked the Mayor of
Libau, Mr. U. Sesks, for permission to build a memorial stone 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 wooden walkway, several hundred meters
long and raised above the surface of the dune, would have to be
built
for visitors, to prevent damage to the dune. 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 stone at the road fork
between
the old and new Shkeede monuments. Indeed, in 2004 a number of Libau
Jews had
written to Mayor Sesks, urging him to ensure that the new monument
acknowledge all victims
murdered by the Nazis at Shkeede: not only Jews but also 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,
evading
its obligation, never installed it. We and many fellow Libauers do not
understand the mentality of people who refuse to honor non-Jewish
victims—including rescuers of
Jews—who opposed the Nazis and were killed by them. We
have
therefore paid for the monument
ourselves. The text, as approved by the City, is shown in Pict. 5.
The monument itself, installed on
27.10.2006, is shown in Pict. 6,
7.
(The
text is hard to read because the black granite
was wet and the lighting was bad). You can review all pictures here.
Edward
Anders and Vladimir Ban, 5.11.2006