A Database of Victims and Survivors
Edward
Anders (Burlingame, CA, USA) and Juris
Dubrovskis (Riga, Latvia)
Many Liepaja Jewish families and
their friends were totally wiped
out in the
Holocaust, leaving nobody to remember their names. Thus, of the 6500+
Liepaja Jews
who perished in WWII, only about 1500 have so far been recorded at
Yad
Vashem. Such oblivion would have pleased Hitler.
We began in 1998 to search for the
names, recovered at least 93%,
and have been listing them on this web site. The methodology of this
project has
been described in an article
in Holocaust and Genocide Studies. A
memorial
book
was published in March
2001
and about 1000 copies were sent at no charge to all Liepaja Jews (or
descendants) whose
addresses we knew and to about 200 libraries and archives. The entire
printing has been distributed, except for a few copies in
Israel. The present (May 2008) revision of this website is likely
to be the last.
Events Of 1941-45
About 7100 Jews lived in Liepaja,
Latvia on 14 June 1941. (Our
database
contains 7142 names, but several hundred are possible duplicates).
About
208
were deported to the USSR that day, a few hundred fled to the USSR
after
Germany attacked the USSR on 22 June 1941, and most of the remaining
ones were
killed during the German occupation that began on 29 June 1941. Most
men were
shot during the summer and fall; at first near the lighthouse, then on
the
Naval Base, and from October 1941 on in the dunes of Shkede north of
town. Women and
children were largely spared until the big Aktion of 14-17 December, 1941, when 2749 Jews
were shot. (For further information, see pictures of the
shootings, taken by the Security Police and secretly copied by survivor
David
Zivcon, and the account
by historian Andrew
Ezergailis).
Killings continued in early 1942, and by the time the ghetto was
established on
1 July 1942, only 832 Jews were left.
The ghetto was closed on 8 October
1943 when the survivors were
taken to
Riga. Young adults were generally spared, but in the next few months
older
people and women with children were killed locally or in Auschwitz.
When the
Red Army approached Riga in the summer of 1944, the survivors were sent
to the
Stutthof concentration camp near Danzig in several transports, from
August to
October 1944. Many died in the increasingly brutal conditions of this
camp,
especially on death marches in early 1945, and only 175 survived. Of
the
deportees and refugees to the USSR, many perished, but some 300
survived.
For a detailed historical account
of the Holocaust in Liepaja, see a
recent article by
Anders or the following excerpt
from Ch. 9 of Andrew Ezergailis, The Holocaust in Latvia,
1941-44. To view the latter
document, you will need the Adobe Reader, which is available at
as a free download. An
excellent book on 20th century Jewish
life in
Latvia is Latvians and Jews between Germany and Russia by the journalist Frank Gordon, now living
in Tel
Aviv. It is available as a free download at http://vip.latnet.lv/LPRA/frank_gordon.htm.
A
more
comprehensive work is Steimanis, Iosifs, "History of
Latvian
Jews", translated from
1995
Latvian and
Russian editions; edited and revised by Edward Anders. New York:
Columbia
University Press & East European Monographs, 2002.
xvi+229
pages, $44.50. (ISBN 0-88033-493-2).
How To Use The
Database
Click on any word in blue
to bring up
further information.
Click on Surnames
for an alphabetical
list of
surnames. Click on a surname
to get to
the Index
section listing all the
people with
that surname, arranged alphabetically by first name. Click on a first
name to bring up a "Family Card"
for
that
person (and his/her spouse, if any). For a complete family, you will see on the Family
Card:
Grandfather |
Grandfather |
Grandmother |
Grandmother |
HUSBAND |
WIFE |
Child |
Child |
Husband on left, wife on right,
the two sets of grandparents
above, and children
below. The
cards for husband and wife contain the following information:
•
Date and place of birth
• Date and place of death
• Occupation
• Address
in August 1941 (A list of
old and new
street names is available here)
• Previous
address
• "Alias" = any variant names for
this person
• KZ = concentration camp
• "Flags" = the person’s fate and
other information.
• Sources of the information. See also the complete
list
of
sources
See the Glossary for further explanations. To bring up family cards for parents and children, click on their names.
There is much
more information on the "Person Sheet". From any
family card, click
on the bold-faced name
(blue) at
the top of the family card. That will bring up a "Person
Sheet" containing all
the known information about that person. Click the numbers in
parentheses
to find where each piece of information comes from.
Maiden
Names
for 1003 women are given in a separate list. These come
mainly
from Yad
Vashem Pages of Testimony,
and often are
misspelled or entirely wrong; sometimes two very different maiden names
are
given for the same person on different Pages.
Name Spellings
Most of the data—about 5700
names—come from a census conducted in
late
August 1941, 2 months into the German occupation. We have translated
most of
these data from the original Latvian into English, except for street
and place
names, which we transliterated by replacing special Latvian characters
by their
English equivalents.
Most of the other 12 sources are
in German, Russian, Hebrew, or
English, and
as these languages transliterate Jewish names differently, a given
surname may
show up in several different parts of the alphabet: Sebba-Zebba-Zeba,
Hurvichs-Gurvich-Gurwitz,
Charnijs-Charny-Tscharny. We have generally standardized these names to
the
German spellings that were used in the Liepaja Jewish cemetery records
before
1941, and have eliminated obvious misspellings and needless variants.
But spellings
of Jewish names were far from uniform even in pre-war days. When
looking for a
given family, check the entire Surnames list
for
any variants.
Limitations of Data
1.
Family Relationships. Most
of the
documents we used contain no information on family
relationships. We therefore had to guess them, on the assumption that people with the
same surname living in the same apartment were related.
2.
People
Without First Names. Most
victims in Soviet
records are identified only by surname, and we have therefore used
"?" or "Child", "Daughter",
"Wife", "Woman", or
"Man" for the missing first
names.
3. Men
Killed Early. We estimate that
at least 300 were omitted from the
census. One indication is the number of women with children but no husband.
4. Children. They often were omitted from the census,
being too
young to work. Perhaps 100 are missing.
5. Refugees
Who Fled to the USSR. Their
apartments were
seized early
during the German occupation and their names were stricken from records
before
the census. We have found no lists whatsoever for these refugees, and
thus had to depend on survivors to tell us their names, especially of
those
who
perished.
Please Report
Errors And Omissions To:
Edward
Anders
525 Almer Rd., Apt. 105
Burlingame, CA 94010-3945, USA
Tel. +1 (650) 343-6910
Acknowledgments
Major assistance to the project was
provided by: Ella Barkan (Tel Aviv), Paul
Berkay (Long Beach), Morris Halle
(Cambridge,
Mass.), and Margers Vestermanis
(Riga).
We are very indebted to the following
people for
providing data. Gunta Minde
and Ira
Zaneriba (Latvian State
Historical
Archives, Riga, Latvia), Danuta Drywa (Panstwowe Muzeum Stutthof w Sztutowie,
Sztutowo, Poland), C.
C. Biedermann and U.
Jost (International Tracing
Service, Bad Arolsen,
Germany), Alex Avraham
and Zvi
Bernhardt (Hall of Names, Yad
Vashem,
Jerusalem), and Vadim Altskan, Aaron
T. Kornblum, and Arnold
Kramer (US Holocaust Memorial
Museum, Washington, DC). Yves
Sandoz of the International
Committee of
the Red Cross in Geneva kindly made the gigantic database of the
International
Tracing Service available to us. German Levin entered data in the early stages of the
project.
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