In Europe

the ‘victims of Nazi terror’. Only since 1989 has the marker clearly indicated that this is a Jewish mass grave.
    Riga's little Jewish museum is full of letterheads and advertisements, all signs of Jewish enterprise from the 1930s: Adolf Levi, tailor; Leibovic, photo studio; Schenker & Co, international transport; Rabinovi, building materials; Holländer & Friedländer, art supplies. Beside them hangs an outline map taken from a report by Group A of the
Sicherheitsdienst
, neatly displaying the ‘production totals’ for autumn 1941. Lithuania: 136,421, with 19,500 still left in the ghetto. Latvia: 35,238, with 25,000 still in the ghetto. Estonia: 963, and the proud note ‘
Judenfrei
’. Beside all these figures is drawn a neat little coffin, the way civil servants in their reports might draw a house, or a tree, or a little stick figure. Everyone who saw this report in early 1942, in other words, could clearly see that the ‘Jewishproblem’ was not being ‘solved’, but that the murdering was going on in the tens of thousands.
    The museum also contains the famous photographs of Jewish women shivering in their underwear, four women and a girl huddled together against the cold and the shame. Pathetic bloomers. Defenceless nakedness. In the next photograph, other people are undressing. Now there is a boy among them, fourteen or fifteen years old, he's out in front, hands in his pockets. Then we see the group standing at the edge of a dune. In the last one they are tumbling down, amid all the other bodies. Beside it hangs an enlarged photograph of the boy. Now I can see the expression on his face. Great fear, his mouth wide open.
    We know the names of the teenage girl who is brushing back her hair shyly with one hand, her head tilted to one side, and the woman with whom she is standing arm in arm. They are Rosa Purve and her mother, both factory workers.
    All of the pictures were taken in the dunes right behind this city. On 15 December, 1941, 2,700 men, women and children were killed by the SS and Latvian guards. Long after the war was over the skulls continued to wash up on the beach: many of the Jews were first driven into the sea, and then killed. Years later a German sailor testified that a great many Latvian regulars had come to watch as well: ‘Come on men, they're going to shoot some Jews!’
    I strike up a conversation with the museum's director, Marger Vestermanis, a man whose face is lined and wrinkled with age. ‘Here everything is always denied. If a German soldier had not happened to take a couple of pictures, the massacre in the dunes would never have taken place. That fire in the synagogue: there are still people who claim there was no one in the building. But we have the personal details of the people who were in it, we have eyewitnesses, everything.’
    In 1941, Marger Vestermanis was living in Riga too. Back then he was the same age as the boy in the picture, but he does not want to talk about his own experiences. ‘I'd rather talk about our research, and about the differences between Latvia and a country like the Netherlands.’ He starts telling me about the continuous conflicts and the crisis in which the Baltic States were trapped from the early years of the twentieth century. Before the Second World War, he emphasises, there was no rabid anti-Semitismhere. ‘There was only an incredible amount of aggression in the air. That's the big difference with the Netherlands. Here there were new regimes all the time, people had to reorient themselves politically all the time. And then suddenly there was the Nazi era: time for the great internal settling of accounts. Between Latvians, too. Who had actually helped the Russians to draft their deportation lists? Who were the communists? During the first six months of the German occupation, 120,000 Latvians were arrested and often shot and killed without a trial. When it's so easy for you to mow down your own countrymen, why worry about some foreign ethnic group?’
    Later I read that, at the age of fifteen, Vestermanis had become a cabinetmaker. That is how he saved himself. Every morning he and a large group of men wearing yellow stars would walk from the ghetto into town to work for the German Army. The men had to sort clothing for the
Sicherheitspolizei
, mop floors in hospitals, clean the staff offices. Vestermanis repaired furniture for the SS.
    When the group came home from work one November evening in 1941, all of the elderly, the women