But they were getting overcrowded, and the obscure lands of the east seemed an excellent place to finish off the rest. Work was begun to expand or begin the six extermination camps of Auschwitz, Treblinka, Belzee, Sobibor, Chelmno, and Maidanek. Until they were ready, however, a place had to be found to exterminate as many as possible and “store” the rest. Riga was chosen.
Between August 1, 1941, and October 14, 1944, almost 200,000 exclusively German and Austrian Jews were shipped to Riga. Eighty thousand stayed there, dead; 120,000 were shipped onward to the six extermination camps of southern Poland already mentioned; and 400 came out alive, half of them to die at Stutthof or on the Death March back to Magdeburg.
Tauber’s transport was the first into Riga from the German Reich, and reached there at 3:45 in the afternoon of August 18, 1941.
The Riga ghetto was an integral part of the city and had formerly been the home of the Jews of Riga, of whom only a few hundred existed by the time I got there. In less than three weeks Roschmann and his deputy, Krause, had overseen the extermination of most of them, as per orders.
The ghetto lay at the northern edge of the city, with open countryside to the north. There was a wall along the south face; the other three were sealed off with rows of barbed wire. There was one gate, on the northern face, through which all exits and entries had to be made. It was guarded by two watchtowers manned by Latvian SS. From this gate, running clear down the center of the ghetto to the south wall, was Mase Kalnu Iela, or Little Hill Street. To the right-hand side of this (looking from south to north toward the main gate) was the Blech Platz, or Tin Square, where selections for execution took place, along with roll call, selection of slave-labor parties, floggings, and hangings. The gallows with its eight steel hooks and permanent nooses swinging in the wind stood in the center of this. It was occupied every night by at least six unfortunates, and frequently several shifts had to be processed by the eight hanging hooks before Roschmann was satisfied with his day’s work.
The whole ghetto must have been just under two square miles, a township that had once housed 12,000 to 15,000 people. Before our arrival the Riga Jews, at least the 2000 of them left, had done the bricking-off work, so the area left to our transport of just over 5000 men, women, and children was spacious. But after we arrived transports continued to come day after day until the population of our part of the ghetto soared to 30,000 to 40,000, and with the arrival of each new transport a number of the existing inhabitants equal to the number of the surviving new arrivals had to be executed to make room for the newcomers. Otherwise the overcrowding would have become a menace to the health of the workers among us, and that Roschmann would not have.
So on that first evening we settled ourselves in, taking the best-con- structed houses, one room per person, using curtains and coats for blankets and sleeping on real beds. After drinking his fill from a water butt, my room neighbor remarked that perhaps it would not be too bad after all. We had not yet met Roschmann.
As summer merged into autumn and autumn into winter, the conditions in the ghetto grew worse. Each morning the entire population-mainly men, for the women and children were exterminated on arrival in far greater percentages than the work-fit males-was assembled on Tin Square, pushed and shoved by the rifle butts of the Latvians, and roll call took place. No names were called; we were counted and divided into work groups. Almost the whole population, men, women, and children, left the ghetto each day in columns to work twelve hours at forced labor in the growing host of workshops nearby.
I had said earlier that I was a carpenter, which was not true, but as an architect I had seen carpenters at work and knew enough to get by. I guessed, correctly, that there would always be a need for carpenters, and I was sent to work in a nearby lumber mill where the local pines were sawed up and made into pre-fabricated hutments for the troops.
The work was backbreaking, enough to ruin the constitution of a healthy man, for we worked, sum er and winter, mainly outside in the cold and damp of the lowlying regions near the coast of Latvia.
Our food rations were a half-liter apiece of so-called soup, mainly tinted water, sometimes with a knob of potato in it, before marching to work in the mornings, and another half-liter, with a slice of black bread and a moldy potato, on return to the ghetto at night.
Bringing food into the ghetto was punishable by immediate hanging before the assembled population at evening roll call on Tin Square.
Nevertheless, to take that risk was the only way to stay alive.
As the columns trudged back through the main gate each evening, Roschmann and a few of his cronies used to stand by the entrance, doing spot checks on those passing through. They would call to a man or a woman or a child at random, ordering the person out of the column to strip by the side of the gate. If a potato or a piece of bread was found, the person would wait behind while the others marched through toward Tin Square for evening roll call.
When they were all assembled, Roschmann would stalk down the road, followed by the other SS guards and the dozen or so condemned people.
The males among them would mount the gallows platform and wait with the ropes around their necks while roll call was completed. Then Roschmann would walk along the line, grinning up at the faces above him and kicking the chairs out from under, one by one. He liked to do this from the front, so the person about to die would see him.
Sometimes he would pretend to kick the chair away, only to pull his foot back in time. He would laugh uproariously to see the man on the chair tremble, thinking he was already swinging at the rope’s end, only to realize the chair was still beneath him.
Sometimes the condemned men would pray to the Lord; sometimes they would cry for mercy.
Roschmann liked to hear this. He would pretend he was slightly deaf, cocking an ear and asking, “Can you speak up a little? What was that you said?” When he had kicked the chair away it was more like a wooden box, really he would turn to his cronies and say, ‘Dear me, I really must get a hearing aid.”
Within a few months Eduard Roschmann had become the Devil incarnate to us prisoners. There was little that he did not succeed in devising.
When a woman was caught bringing food into the camp, she was made to watch the hangings of the men first, especially if one was her husband or brother. Then Roschmann made her kneel in front of the rest of us, drawn up around three sides of the square, while the camp barber shaved her bald.
After roll call she would be taken to the cemetery outside the wire and made to dig a shallow grave, then kneel beside it while Roschmann or one of the others fired a bullet from his Luger point-blank into the base of the skull. No one was allowed to watch these executions, but word seeped through from the Latvian guards that he would often fire past the ear of the woman to make her fall into the grave with shock, then climb out again and kneel in the same position. Other times he would fire from an empty chamber, so there was just a click when the woman thought she was about to die. The Latvians were brutes, but Roschmann managed to amaze them for all that.
There was one certain girl at Riga who helped the prisoners at her own risk. She was Olli Adler-from Munich, I believe. Her sister Gerda had already been shot in the cemetery for bringing in food. Olli was a girl of surpassing beauty and took Roschmann’s fancy. He made her his concubine-the official term was housemaid, because relations between an SS man and a Jewish girl were banned. She used to smuggle medicines into the ghetto when she was allowed to visit it, having stolen them from the SS stores. This, of course, was punishable by death. The last I saw of her was when we boarded the ship at Riga docks.