Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Max Michelson, a retired engineer, is married and lives in Framingham, Massachusetts. With his wife Julia, he has raised two sons, and Michelson regards his three grandchildren as the best thing that has ever happened to him.

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CITY OF LIFE CITY OF DEATH

University Press of Colorado

Contents

Preface...........................................................ixAcknowledgments...................................................xiPART I: GROWING UP JEWISH IN PREWAR LATVIA........................11 My Background...................................................32 Grandmother Emma................................................63 The Jewish Community of Riga....................................174 My Father.......................................................215 My Mother and Our Home..........................................286 Grandmother Sophie and the Griliches Family.....................387 Sylvia..........................................................458 My Aunts and Uncles.............................................489 Thea, Arthur, and Manfred Peter.................................5810 Summers at Jurmala.............................................6511 My Schools.....................................................7012 Soviet Occupation of Latvia....................................76PART II: THE WAR AND POSTWAR YEARS................................8113 Germany Attacks the Soviet Union...............................8314 The Nazis Enter Riga...........................................8615 Riga Ghetto....................................................9316 Aktion: The Destruction of the Riga Ghetto.....................9917 Little Ghetto..................................................10618 KZ Kaiserwald..................................................12719 KZ Stutthof....................................................13220 Polte-Werke-Magdeburg..........................................13621 Liberation.....................................................14122 Human Again....................................................14423 Finding Relatives..............................................15224 A New Country, a New Beginning.................................15725 Building a Life................................................163The Michelson Family Tree.........................................167The Griliches Family Tree.........................................168Notes.............................................................169

Chapter One

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I was born in Riga, Latvia, in 1924, the second child in an upper-middle-class Jewish family. My sister, Sylvia, eight years my senior, was born in Moscow. My parents had delayed having a second child because of the disruption of World War I, the family's evacuation to Moscow and eventual return to Riga, as well as the political uncertainties of the period. By the early 1920s the situation in the now independent Latvia had stabilized, and my family resumed a comfortable existence in the large villa adjoining our plywood factory. The household was ruled by a matriarch, my paternal grandmother Emma, with the help of our Latvian cook. My father, Dietrich (David), was born in 1879 in Riga, the oldest of five children; my mother, Erna Griliches, was born in 1890 in Vilna and was also one of five siblings. Her family operated a tannery in Dvinsk.

I grew up in a Jewish atmosphere, albeit one where religion did not play a central role. Orthodox Judaism, the only religious expression available, occupied a secondary position in our lives. Even as we acknowledged it as our religion, we considered it archaic, not relevant or essential to life in the twentieth century. At the same time, although dismissing religion from our daily existence, we decisively identified ourselves as Jews. Being Jewish was perceived largely in cultural and ethnic terms, and it found expression in a strong sense of belonging to one people. This identification was to some extent dictated and reinforced by the outside community, which classified everyone in the population in terms of their ethnic origin. Jews found this identification reasonably congenial and were comfortable with this arrangement. Jews also thought of themselves as a separate people and had very limited social interaction with the general community.

The problem of Jewish survival in a hostile Diaspora was widely debated. For many, Zionism provided a secular messianic solution to the so-called Jewish question, how to normalize the situation of the Jews in Eastern Europe. We lived in a society that took anti-Semitism for granted but discounted its potential for large-scale violence and mayhem. Even the dramatic rise of Hitler and his explicitly anti-Semitic rantings did not warn us of the imminent catastrophe. In the nation-states of Europe, the Jew was the other, the perennial outsider. In times of economic hardship and depression he became a ready scapegoat. Rather than find effective solutions that would address and resolve the crisis, governments fanned the prevalent anti-Semitism by blaming the Jews for their difficulties. Anti-Semitism persists to this day, although virtually no Jews are living in the newly independent Latvia. Latvians are also blaming the local ethnic Russians for their problems. The Russians have taken the place formerly occupied by the Jews as a convenient scapegoat.

To me as a child, Latvia seemed safe and secure. Although I was well aware of the persecutions of the Jews, I believed they were ancient history, that the pogroms had occurred long ago and far away. Yet the history of Jewish settlement in Latvia is one of exploitation, persecution, and uncertainty. The concession of the right of Jews to reside in Riga to the subsequent extermination of the city's Jewish community took place in a span of only 100 years, about four generations. And those years were hardly a golden age. My childish belief that twentieth-century civilization had brought an end to persecution of the Jews now seems hopelessly naive, yet this belief was shared by many of my elders. When we recognized the danger posed by endemic anti-Semitism, it was already too late.

My paternal grandparents came from the western Latvian province of Courland (Kurzeme in Latvian),* which had been conquered and colonized by the Germans in the thirteenth century. German culture remained dominant in the area even after its annexation by Russia, and the German language was widely used. Jews were not permitted to settle in significant numbers in Courland until the seventeenth century. There were repeated expulsions that, however, were not rigidly or consistently enforced. Frequently, the threat of expulsion was simply a pretext for mulcting the Jews. Jews came north to Courland from Lithuania and Poland, where they had lived for several centuries. To a lesser extent they also reached the Courland ports of Libau (Liepaja) and Windau (Ventspils) from the Netherlands by way of Germany, in the wake of the expanding German Hansa trade along the Baltic Sea.

Jews worked as tax farmers, vodka distillers, innkeepers, small merchants, and peddlers. Generally, the only source of credit available to peasants was from Jewish pawnbrokers. Useful to the dukes and the landowning gentry as both creators and sources of wealth, the Jews were to some extent both protected and exploited by them. Townspeople-burghers, merchants, and artisans-unwilling to tolerate Jewish business rivals clamored incessantly for onerous measures intended to restrict the Jews' economic and social activities or for their outright expulsion from the province-something the German barons were loath to do.

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