Latvia’s Empty Gesture
By Jeffrey Goldberg
The Forward, February 27, 1998
Janis Lipke lived and died in a squalid and freezing hut by a river in Riga, Latvia. He and his wife, Johanna, lived there without money and without honor. Many of their countrymen saw them as traitors. When I met the Lipkes in their hut in the winter of 1986, there were even rumors afoot in Riga that they were part-Jewish. How else to explain their inexplicable behavior during World War II, when they rescued Jews from the Riga Ghetto, a ghetto maintained — and then liquidated — with the enthusiastic help of the Latvian people?
I was reminded of my encounter with Janis Lipke by a promise made recently by the president of Latvia, Guntis Ulmanis, to finally honor Lipke. When I met the Lipkes, their days were already numbered. He was bedridden with heart disease, and his wife suffered from glaucoma. They existed without the meager medical help the communist health apparatus provided to those citizens in good odor with the party. The Soviets had cut Lipke’s pension after he accepted a small award from Israel and after he befriended Riga’s small and besieged community of refuseniks.
I met Lipke while traveling through the Soviet Union on behalf of an organization that aided refuseniks, and it was a refusenik leader who directed my fellow secret agent, Kevin Aaronson, and me to Lipke. It was not in our job description to aid Gentiles — we were busy enough already — but who could let pass the opportunity to meet a righteous man in a country that contained so few righteous men?
In the small Jewish community of Riga — only 3,000 of Latvia’s 70,000 Jews survived the war, which suggests the depth of Latvian complicity — Lipke is known as the Latvian Wallenberg. As a civilian employee of the Luftwaffe, Lipke was assigned to transport Jewish workers to and from the ghetto. He would provide them food and medicine, and quietly move them, one or two at a time, to the relative safety of the countryside, or to ad hoc shelters he created within the city. Sometimes, he would pay farm families to hide the Jews; other times the Jews would pay themselves. As he was sneaking Jews out of the ghetto, his wife would sneak food in.
All told, Lipke saved 40 or 50 Jews this way. Of those, however, only a dozen or so survived, many of the others having been betrayed by Latvians in the countryside. But a dozen Jews is still a dozen Jews, and for this, the Jewish people, or, more to the point, those few Jews who remember his exploits, are grateful. Lipke was awarded the status of Righteous Gentile by Yad Vashem, and a tree was planted there in his honor.
I remember the afternoon we visited the Lipkes as dim and dreary, but I distinctly recall their hovel as being absurdly cheery. The Lipkes were gracious hosts, and through a refusenik translator, Janis Lipke told us his story. He was remarkably self-effacing and spoke simply. I remember asking him just one question, the obvious one: Why risk your life, day after day, for people you didn’t know, for people that your own people despised? His answer was the one righteous Gentiles often give: He was a man of action, and he could not sit idly by.
We spent the better part of the afternoon listening to Lipke’s story, and then he asked us quietly if we might have some aspirin for he and his wife. As part of our mission to isolated refuseniks, we brought with us a supply of over-the-counter drugs. We left for our hotel and our drug supply, promising to return in an hour. We never did return with the aspirin. Though we practiced semicompetent tradecraft, it was obvious to the KGB’s Jewish section what we were doing in the Soviet Union; for alleged art students, we took in little art. KGB agents had been following us quite ostentatiously for several days, and, on the way back to Lipke’s house from the hotel, we were harassed and then stopped by a squad of thugs. Two days later, in Leningrad, we were formally detained, questioned and expelled from the Soviet Union and told we would never be allowed to return. But we had accomplished what we had wanted to do, except for one thing: delivering to Janis Lipke the aspirin he politely requested.
Lipke died a short while later, destitute but loved by Riga’s Jews and by those who looked after the righteous Gentiles. “The greatest role model in Latvia is, as we know, Janis Lipke,” the former deputy prime minister of Sweden, Per Ahlmark, recently told a gathering of Latvian Jewish survivors. “He is one of the heroes of our time.”
In life, Lipke was no hero to Latvia. His story was a reminder to the Letts that their past is soiled by collaboration with the Nazis. To many Latvian nationalists who saw the Nazis as saviors, his work undermining the fascist regime was tantamount to communist subversion. So it was left to Jewish survivors and their friends, foremost among them Mr. Ahlmark, to plead with the Latvians to remember Lipke as a hero, not as a traitor.
So it was a small victory that President Ulmanis of Latvia, on a recent visit with the editorial board of the Forward, promised to see a street named after Lipke in Riga. Latvia’s ambassador in Washington, Ojars Kalnins, told me this week that the authorities in Riga have already approved the dedication of a street in Lipke’s name.
I expected my contacts among the Latvian survivor community to be pleased with this first step by Latvia’s government to recognize Lipke, but they were less than content. Holocaust survivors obviously retain hard feelings about those who oppressed them, but the disgust survivors of the Riga Ghetto feel toward Latvians seems to be virtually without parallel. “The Latvians started killing Jews before the Nazis arrived. They hated Jews then, they hate Jews now, and don’t let them convince you otherwise,” a Riga Ghetto survivor, Professor Gertrude Schneider of the CUNY Graduate Center, told me.
President Ulmanis and Ambassador Kalnins are smooth, conciliatory and diplomatic; they know how to soothe anxious Jewish nerves by apologizing for past injustices. But here’s a fact that says more about Latvia today than any public apology or street naming: In the seven years since Latvia gained its independence, the total number of Latvian collaborators who have been prosecuted for crimes against humanity is zero, and the total number of extradition requests made by Latvia to countries that harbor Latvian war criminals is zero, too.
The best way, perhaps the only way, for Latvia to honor Janis Lipke, a man who was disrespected by Latvians in life, is to prosecute the men who killed the Jews Lipke fought to save. Anything else is just talk.