First case for Latvia's family detective

 
  • 2015-02-13
  • by Lauris Olups

When Marija contacted me for the first time, she had just learned the names of her parents. She was one of 74 orphaned Baltic children airlifted from a DP camp in Germany to the US in 1949, where she was adopted by a Lutheran pastor’s family. She had made prior inquiries in the 60s to the Riga orphanage where she had spent her early years, but they had reported that her mother had died in childbirth and her father was a partisan fighting against the Soviets, creating the assumption that he, too, had passed away.

Marija was coming to Latvia for the first time in 70 years and wanted to see if she can find out more about her past. My first job was making a few phone calls to people sharing the same last name in the area, which, through kind help of strangers, led me to a witty and youthful lady called Leonora, Marija’s aunt and closest living relative, who actually... babysat little Marija until Latvian SS forces came and ripped her family apart...

But I’m getting ahead of myself. Here is what had happened. Marija’s father turned out to be a Soviet partisan. Just like his father. Actually, their whole house was a partisan HQ. Not that their family sided with the Russians ideologically, their whole approach was practical – they had guessed that the Russians would win the war. They were right, but they did not expect a plane landing overnight to drop reinforcements would be the final proof for the already suspicious police officer to call the local authorities about partisan activities in the area. The phone call was overheard by a man sympathetic to their cause who came to warn them, so Marija’s father Bronislav along with his brothers ran away to the swamps, hoping the SS soldiers would spare his wife Salomeja and the newborn daughter, who was less than a year old at the time.

He was mistaken: everyone was taken away, and only the older children, among them Marija’s aunt Leonora, aged around 10 back then, were left in the house. Everyone was taken to the prison in Rēzekne (the biggest city in the surrounding area). Marija’s grandfather August was shot, and, while visiting the memorial to the mass grave where he now lies, Aunt Leonora recalled a story told by August’s brother who was forced to dig his grave: minutes before August was to be lined to be shot, his brother discreetly kissed him on the cheek and whispered “I’m sorry, brother”. The SS soldiers, however, were very observant, and August’s brother received a beating for that.

While Marija was still preparing for the trip to Latvia, my research led me to advertisements placed in Soviet newspapers aimed at returning expatriates. On multiple occasions during the decade her father placed ads looking for his long-lost daughter Marija, pleading to the state to help him find her. So... he hadn’t died in war as the orphanage director had claimed, and her mother hadn’t died in childhood either. I also found records from the orphanage clearly stating that the child had been brought from the infamous Salaspils concentration camp.

When Marija arrived, our first stop was Riga Orphanage, where she met the current staff and was walked through the same premises where she spent her days after arriving from the death camp. The next day we set out to meet Aunt Leonora, who would be joining us for a three-day trip through their native Latgale area. The dots started to connect. It turned out that Marija’s father had hidden in the swamp until the Germans were gone, then he had surfaced in Riga working as a police officer along with his brother. It was his grave in Dobele we visited, and Marija planted a tree next to it. All the while Leonora kept telling stories of her childhood and family, which I was interpreting for Marija to record for the book she was setting out to write.

We found out that baby Marija along with her mom and grandma were taken to Rēzekne prison, and later sent to Salaspils death camp. Under the rules of the camp, children were immediately separated from mothers and placed in special child barracks, where few caretakers attended to them. Leonora recalled Salomeja’s mother Helena telling that Salomeja held on to her baby with all her might, kicking and screaming, but they were ripped apart, never to see each other again. That is when Salomeja almost collapsed, finding no reason to go on. Still she perservered and survived the Salaspils camp experience, but when Soviet troops were advancing, some prisoners were killed, others shipped to camps in German territories. Marija’s mother and grandma were among the ones who got transferred.

We spent the second day of our trip in her native Latgale, visiting the church where her parents married and she was christened. We spoke to some old ladies who still recalled her parents. With Aunt Leonora’s help we were able to locate the house she had been born in, although it had been moved and rebuilt 30 kilometres away. The family now living in the house were kind enough to let us in and allowed Marija to stand in the same room where her life had begun.

When in Germany, Marija’s mother spent seven months in the infamous Bergen-Belsen camp (arriving there in the same year as Anne Frank, one of the most famous victims of the camp).  After that, she ended up in a DP camp in, where she met a German man and fell in love. A year and eight months went by, a child was born, but Salomeja decided to return to her native Latvia, then again under Soviet rule. Her German had promised to follow her. Or so she claimed. Leonora recounts that the Salomeja who returned from her concentration camp experience was not the same person. Scarred, cold and proud, holding on to her new baby and hoping for her man and a new life. None of that came true. The baby died soon after. The man never came. After Salomeja’s return her husband tried to reach her to reunite the family, but she could never forgive him. His partisan activities had ripped the family apart, lost their only child and sent people spiralling down the path of victims of war.

Another tree was planted near Salomeja’s grave in Latgale, just next to where her baby German half-brother lies. After exploring her native land for two days, seeing the hill where the fateful plane with partisan reinforcements had landed, and many other sights, we set off to Dobele to meet her half-brother, a son from her father’s second marriage. Although Marija insisted that there are no “halves” in a family and called him a brother. When we first saw him, the similarity was obvious, they were certainly one father’s children. We found out that he has three sons, all three of whom live in Scotland now, and Marija has promised to visit them.

On our last day while returning to Riga we paid a visit to Salaspils death camp memorial. Marija planted flowers and the place where the children’s barracks used to be. The entrance to the memorial says: Beyond this gate the earth wails. In our case, it does so indeed, for it was on this soil that Marija was torn away from her mother to become an orphan, still lucky enough to slide through the cogs of the war machine and have a loving family in the United States. Now Marija is back home and keen on writing a memoir of her life and ancestry. Meanwhile, I’m working with a handful of other cases, helping people reconnect with their past. Pay a visit to familydetective.lv on Facebook or my website www.familydetective.lv if you’d like to find out more.

 
 

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