Four who saved Jews receive highest award

Jul 06, 2000
Sandra L. Medearis

Receiving awards at Riga Palace were Bruno Rozentals, 74, Olga
Kruzmane, 83, Juris Berzins, 74, and Yadviga Ocehovska, 76.

Rozentals said although he had received honors from a number of
countries, this honor from Latvia meant the most.

"It is this decoration, the Order of Three Stars, that I will always
appreciate most highly," he told President Vaira Vike-Freiberga

Each of the four received a medal, a certificate tied with a ribbon
in Latvian red and white and a bouquet of red roses with stems a
meter long.

Vike-Freiberga handed off the decorations, helped by community
leaders and a soloist who presented patriotic songs about Latvia as a
motherland.

Vike-Freiberga noted that there has been evil in the "mother land."

"For the evil is, has been and always will be with us. We are not
always able to escape and to avoid it, but what we can do is to
fight against it with all our might," she said, adding now that
independence has been regained, Latvia can follow the ideals upon
which it was founded: "respect for the human being, for human life as
being sacred, for human life that must not be annihilated."

Desecrations of two memorial monuments marking sites where Jews were
persecuted and killed in the Riga area were found July 3 and 4.
Vike-Freiberga said memorials should be held sacred as reminders.
About 95 percent of Latvia's Jewish population of about 70,000 were
killed during the Nazi occupation, sometimes with collaboration of
local people.

Grigory Krupnikov, a leader in the Jewish community thanked the four
for their bravery.

"We fully understand the risks to their lives and their families to
help our people," Krupnikov said. This is real heroism, different
even than that at the front lines which perhaps was momentary. This
risk was everyday, 24 hours a day, for months. No scales or financial
instruments can weigh human relations ... can weigh the risks these
[men and women] took."

Hiding and saving Jews during World War II required not only great
bravery, but also stealth and cunning. Rozentals hid 36 Jews beneath
a barn with stairs concealed under a stove. He even built beds in the
hideaway. The State of Israel has decorated about 25 Latvians and
Lithuanians during the past year for saving Jews, designating the
saviors as Righteous Among Nations, Israel's highest honor for
non-Jews.

On July 3, as Latvia prepared to award its high honors to the four,
it was discovered that a memorial to 400 men, women and children
locked in and burned alive in the Choral Synagogue on Riga's Gogola
Street had been desecrated with a swastika, a picture of a Nazi
soldier and German words meaning "subhuman."

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