Redeemed by a Series of ‘Endless Miracles,’ a Latvian Jew Tells His Story

Jack Ratz closes his eyes and he is a boy again, running with his brothers along the cobblestone streets of Riga, Latvia.

They are playing stickball down the street from their house, which doubles as their father’s tailor shop. Their mother is calling them to get cleaned up for dinner.

Then the nightmare takes over. Tanks rumble into the city, cracking the stone streets. Jack and his family are herded into a ghetto. Firing squads kill his mother and brothers; their bodies are buried in unmarked mass graves.

A sliding glass door in a Manhattan office building snaps the stooped, 71-year-old Holocaust survivor back to the present.

“Just read it. Tell the story,” he says, pushing his memoir, “Endless Miracles,” into a reporter’s hands. “Be one of my miracles.”

Ratz’s miracles--dodging firing squads, surviving death camps and bouts of sickness and now living with an aged, failing heart--are wrapped around a lesser-known chapter of the Holocaust: the massacre of the Latvian Jews at Riga.

“Nobody knows what happened to the Latvian Jews. I’m telling what happened to them. That I lived to tell about it is a miracle. That I lived to write about it, that’s a great miracle,” he said.

Historians estimate that fewer than 1% of the 80,000 Jews living in Latvia survived World War II.

During the first week of December 1941, between 10,000 and 30,000 Jews--historians disagree on the number--were taken by the Nazis from the Riga ghetto to a nearby forest, shot and buried in mass graves.

“Riga gets lost when you talk about the Holocaust . . . because everybody talks about what happened in Poland . . . in Auschwitz,” said Gertrude Schneider, author of several books about the Holocaust and the Latvian Jews.

But Ratz remembers.

In simple prose, an oral history put to paper, Ratz spent years scrawling his memories on hundreds of sheets of paper.

“Nobody has ever questioned the facts of the book,” said Howard L. Adelson, a history professor at the City University of New York.

Ratz tells how first the Soviets and later the Nazis invaded Riga, running over people in the streets with tanks or shooting them as they ran. He tells how his boyhood friend, Menachem Steinman, was caught by the soldiers and forced to pour gasoline on a synagogue with its congregation locked inside.

He writes about being loaded onto a boat in Riga--on Yom Kippur, the Jewish Day of Atonement--and sent to the Stutthof concentration camp in Germany.

But it is his memory of the Riga ghetto, surrounded by barbed wire and machine guns, that still causes him to lose sleep.

At first, his family managed to stay together, cramped into a small, dingy apartment.

But on Nov. 29, 1941, the Nazis separated men over 16 from their families. Ratz, 14 at the time, believed he was a man. He and his father were marched away, assigned to clean the town’s police department.

That night, when they returned, they were sent to an area cordoned off from the rest of the ghetto.

Then the massacre began.

“The screaming and shooting were unbearable and continued all night long,” he wrote. “When we went to work the next morning, we found out that half of the ghetto population was gone.”

What began that night was the weeding out of Jews classified by the Nazis as nonessential workers--women, children and the elderly--to make room for other Jews being brought from Austria, Czechoslovakia and Hungary. Ratz remembers that for seven days trucks and buses full of people w1701995808driven out of the ghetto. His mother and three of his siblings disappeared the first day.

His youngest brother left on the third day. Ratz last glimpsed him through the barbed wire, yelling greetings.

Later, historians learned the people were sent to the nearby Rumbuli Forest, where they were herded to the edges of mass graves and machine-gunned, their bodies toppling into the pits.

On Dec. 8, 1941, in their last sweep, soldiers walked through the ghetto, breaking down doors and randomly shooting the remaining Jews.

The next day, more than 800 bodies were pulled out of the buildings. They were burned and the remains thrown into a mass grave at a cemetery next to the ghetto, Ratz said.

And all this--the massacre, the shouts of terror, the sporadic gunfire--the teenager and his father watched and heard from behind the barbed wire.

“I’m alive today because I couldn’t make up my mind if I should stay with my mother. I thought I was a man, so I went with my father,” he said.

That, he says, was a miracle.

There would be more miracles: twice avoiding a firing squad, surviving two forced marches and Stutthof concentration camp.

And, finally, a new life in America--marriage, three children, 10 grandchildren, a successful business, and a book written and published by a man without a high school education.

All, he says, are miracles.