In Europe

and children, had disappeared from the ghetto. Later it turned out that the entire Jewish community of Riga, 30,000 people in all, had been taken out to the edge of town. There, most of them were shot beside enormous pits.
    For the 4,000 surviving
Arbeidsjuden
, a new ghetto – the Little Ghetto – was roped off. The old ghetto was immediately put to use for new groups of Jews brought in from Berlin, Stuttgart, Vienna, Cologne, Prague and other Central European cities. For most of them, Riga was merely a stopping-off point on their way to the end. Vestermanis himself was finally sent on transport to Courland. Farmers sneaked food to him and his comrades by leaving potatoes and bread along the road. After a while he escaped, and in the woods he joined up with a wandering group of German and Latvian deserters.
    But he did not want to talk about that.
    Back in Vilnius I had had a strange experience. In this city approximately a third of the Jewish population, some 70,000 people in all, had been executed in a park. Paneriai is the name of the park, and it is only a few kilometres outside town. All those families are still lying there, in massgraves. In my attempts to get there I asked three different taxi drivers, but not one of them had ever heard of the place. Finally I found one who was willing to drive me in that direction.
    After a lot of asking and searching, we at last found the spot. It was an echoingly quiet stretch of woods the size of a large campsite, beside some railway tracks. There were hollows and hillocks everywhere, dusted with the last covering of snow. The wind was blowing through the treetops. Otherwise nothing, except for a mangy horse and a little monument. Since 1991 one can read that most of the victims were Jewish – before that, the inscription spoke of ‘Soviet citizens’. The taxi driver walked along with me, visibly moved. ‘The things people do to each other.’ About 200 metres further on were the first dachas, beyond a bungalow park.
    In the plane to Berlin I flip through the glossy magazine
Baltic Outlook
. I happen upon an interview with the beautiful Ines Misan, raised in a provincial Latvian town, the child of a perpetually drunken father, today a top fashion model in New York and a welcome guest at official openings and parties thrown by the likes of Madonna, Armani and Versace. ‘I have two identical Mercedes.’
    Question: ‘What do you find important?’
    Answer: ‘Money. I like being able to give myself whatever I want. That's what I love about America. There, if someone has no money, he's lazy. Or he has no education, or he's an alcoholic or a drug addict. A normal person, a man who loves a woman, knows that she needs all that. American men live with their wives for five or six years, then dump them for a younger woman. That's why I've had so many boyfriends.’
    Question: ‘Can you honestly say that you have never used a man?’ Answer: ‘I have, I've done that, more than once. But I didn't do it to be nasty. I married an American because I knew that then I would be allowed to stay in America, but I also liked him a lot. But does the fact that you have a car, money and an apartment in New York mean that you've sold yourself? Sure, girls from the former Soviet Union go out with rich men, but in the end they marry for love and not for money?’
    Question: ‘What didn't you like about Europe?’
    Answer: ‘Whenever I go to Paris, I always end up in a bad mood. Because the people there don't wash themselves, they stink, even theirso-called aristocrats stink. In America, even the workers wash themselves, they're clean. In Europe, everyone walks around with their nose in the air.’
    At the pavement cafés along Kurfürstendamm, people are sitting out in the spring sun. For the first time since 1945, Germany is at war. Kosovo has tried to secede from the Yugoslav Federation, the Serb Army has rolled into the province and is crushing the rebellion with an iron fist. Albanian families are being killed or driven from their villages, hundreds of thousands of people are refugees, Europe fears a new round of genocide.
    And now, since yesterday, NATO is intervening. The Germans see it as a ‘humanitarian war’. On the evening news I watch aircraft decorated with the Germany military cross rolling out onto the runway, ready to bomb Belgrade and Serb targets in Kosovo. The
Bild-Zeitung
is selling copies faster than the news-stands can stock them. The front page is framed with