Linda Kinstler

She went to school with other Russian-speaking children, some of whom were Latvian Jews, sons and daughters of the lucky few who had been hidden away by righteous gentiles, or who had fought with the famous 43rd Latvian Rifle Guards Battalion of the Soviet army. The others, like her own family, had moved to Riga after the war, their families mostly intact, having spent the war in the eastern evacuation zones.

Some of her schoolteachers were survivors themselves, but no one knew for sure. The survivors, they were silent. They had not yet been glorified, honoured, beatified. They simply went about their lives as best they could. Only decades later did my mother find out that the school principal, Nina Dmitrievna Alieva, was an inmate in Salaspils concentration camp. Only later did she learn of rumours that their strict chorus teacher had climbed out of a ditch in Rumbula.

I hurried through the gate and found myself standing alone on a wide, open walkway lined with linden trees. This was the Road of Contemplation, the long path separating the world of the living from that of the dead, a symbolic River Styx. ‘The living on one side, and the dead on the other,’ a guide to the cemetery explains. Every year, Latvians walk the five kilometres separating the Freedom Monument in the city centre to the cemetery. They carry candles, flowers and flags as they proceed, each step reminding them of their own inexorable march towards death, each step bringing them closer to the fallen. The university fraternities march in groups, the Lettonia men wearing their green and yellow caps. The Road of Contemplation is only 200 metres long, but in some sense it spans the entire nation.

The trial was a spectacle in every sense of the word, a striking public display of grief, mourning, terror and mystification. The judges in their billowing black robes, their judicial dress ‘infused with a primitive kind of alchemical power,’ Rogat writes. The defendant seated in his bullet-proof glass box, flanked by his guards. The theater was packed; on some days, spectators lined up around the block for a chance to partake in the proceedings. A special police unit, ‘Bureau 06’, had prepared the evidence: 1,600 documents on the Nazi programme to annihilate the Jewish people, many of them bearing Eichmann’s signature. One hundred and eight survivors took the stand. They swore on the Hebrew Bible, they listed the names of the dead.