For many years, we did not speak of our history during the Holocaust. Like so many Jewish families, the silence was heavy. But through relatives and records at Yad Vashem, we were able to piece together what happened to my father’s family in Riga, Latvia.
When the Nazis invaded Riga in 1941, my grandfather Shaya Beinart was 18 years old. He and his father Isaac were working as mechanics at the train station in separate locations. Soviet soldiers were evacuating on the last train out of the city. They saw Shaya, shouted that the Germans were already across the Daugava River, and physically pushed him onto the train. He did not have time to find his father. That moment saved his life.
Shaya ended up in Tashkent, Uzbekistan, where he worked and stayed for the duration of the war. His father was not able to escape the Nazis. He survived only because he was a skilled mechanic. The Germans used him to repair vehicles and machinery. When the war ended, both my grandfather and his father returned to their home in Riga. Neither knew the other was alive for a year. Isaac returned home from concentration camps in 1945 and Shaya came back almost a year later from Tashkent.
The rest of the family was taken from their home, brought to a forest outside the city, and murdered. Twenty-two members of the Beinart family were wiped out. It was an old Latvian neighbor who pointed out the Jewish family to the Gestapo and not only turned them in but participated in the murder of the entire family. A neighbor who had lived next to them for generations, side by side, yet had no issue giving them up to the Nazis.
Only two survived, my grandfather Shaya and his father Isaac. The trauma of losing everyone never left him.
About 70,000 Jews were murdered in Latvia before liberation.
My father recently passed away, and today I am sharing his family’s story to make sure that we never forget.
Photo: My father Vladimir, my mother Zhanna, myself and my brother right before we fled Soviet Latvia
Source: Julia Bendis
