In Europe

It is Saturday evening. The squatters’ café, called the Horseradish Sandwich, is enormously popular because of its old Soviet flotsam and cheap vodka. Restaurant Nostalgia, once the watering hole for the Sovietelite, is now full of young people. The dining room was designed in inimitable Stalinist style, with Roman pillars, heavy chandeliers, French viewing holes in the ceiling and everything else that might appeal to the party's parvenus. Ten years later the Latvian young people see this as ‘cool camp’. This is the place to be, the place to be seen. I myself take to Café Amsterdama. I stare at the two Amsterdam cityscapes on the wall and the three bottles of Grolsch beer behind the bar.
    This is a peculiar city, it occurs to me, a city that switches historical eras as though they were backdrops on a stage. I have brought along the fat catalogue from the Museum of the Occupation, glossy and colourful, subsidised with a grant from the
Landtag
of Mecklenburg Vorpommern. At the door I was also handed a thin, cheap brochure:
The Jews in Riga
, published by the local Jewish documentation centre. I lay them side by side. What the official catalogue – with a foreword by the Latvian president – writes about the Soviet occupation is quite striking, but striking as well are all the things it does not mention.
    The catalogue correctly mentions the flowers with which the German ‘liberators’ were welcomed by the Latvians in 1941. I read all about the Nazis’ plans to ‘Germanise’ the Baltic States and recolonise them. The Boulevard of Liberty in the centre of Riga was rechristened Adolf-Hitler-Strasse, the traditional holidays were banned, the economy was placed under German control, workers were sent to Germany to perform forced labour.
    There is one issue, though, that the catalogue barely touches on: the zealous support the Germans received in Latvia and Lithuania for their persecution of the Jews. That morbid zeal had everything to do with the violent cycle of revolution and counter-revolution in which people had been caught up here for decades. The Jewish citizenry – some of them communists, others capitalists – were the ideal scapegoats. In essence, the pattern seen in Vienna was repeated here. ‘The Jew spoke German and was on occasion more German than the German,’ writes Modris Eksteins in his impressive personal history of the Baltic States. ‘The Jew spoke Russian and again could be a better spokesman for Russian culture than the Russian. The Jew was a town-dweller, a cosmopolitan. The Jew was all things – but to many Latvians, caught up in the mood of growing paranoia and crude nationalism, he represented all things foreign, all things dangerous.’
    As soon as the Soviets withdrew in summer 1941, therefore, the population of Latvia and Lithuania turned on the Jews. The museum catalogue, published last year, speaks only of Latvian ‘Self-Defence Troops’ who ‘closed battle with retreating Soviet units’ and with ‘those who supported Soviet rule’. ‘They killed approximately 6,000 Soviet party activists of various nationalities and origins: Latvians, Russians and Jews.’
    But what really happened? On 29 June, 1941, even before the Gestapo and the
Einsatzkommandos
had arrived, all Jewish males between the ages of sixteen and fifty were rounded up on the market square in the Latvian town of Daugavpils. More than 1,000 of them were killed right there by the Latvians themselves. All over Riga, on the night of 2 July, Jewish property was looted and Jews were murdered. At noon on 4 July, dozens of Jewish families were driven into the Greise Hor Schul, Riga's biggest synagogue. Approximately 300 Lithuanian-Jewish refugees had also taken refuge in the cellars of the synagogue. Latvian Nazis locked the doors and set the building on fire. Hundreds of Jews were burned alive. A similar atrocity took place at Riga's Old Jewish Cemetery. The catalogue from the Museum of the Occupation mentions none of this. It shows only a photograph of the wooden steeple of St Peter's Church, which burned down during the fitful fighting around Riga in those same days, ‘as did a considerable number of the old city's historic buildings’. To this it adds that the Soviet rulers ignored ‘the exceptional threat to the Jewish population from the National Socialists’. Then, the authors say, the German occupiers tried to use a number of ‘suggestible Latvians’ to terrorise the civilian population.
    But,