Riga: Surviving in the Small Ghetto?

Max Kaufmann, a Riga Jew who survived the ghetto and was assigned to the work columns

is a Jewish merchant from Riga, in his forties. Like thousands of others, he was confined in the autumn of 1941 to the ghetto set up in the Maskavas district, where the Germans and their Latvian auxiliaries penned the city's Jewish community.

On 30 November and 8 December 1941, the ghetto is emptied in two waves. Whole columns of women, children, and the elderly are marched on foot to the forest, a few kilometres to the south-east, and shot at the edge of pits dug in advance. Kaufmann was held back at the last moment among the able-bodied men the occupier keeps for forced labour. In the aftermath of the shootings, the survivors — a few thousand men employed in the work commandos, and a handful of women classed as seamstresses — are squeezed into a reduced sector, the small ghetto, separated by barbed wire from the part now reserved for Jews deported from the Reich. His wife and son are gone.

Kaufmann must decide how to endure in what remains of an annihilated world. He can cling to the work columns that leave the small ghetto each day, making his usefulness a reprieve; try to escape toward the surrounding forests to reach the partisans, at the risk of being handed over or shot; or seek, within the barbed wire itself, to build a clandestine network to organise and resist.