Latvian Jew’s ‘Miracles’ Reveals Memories of Massacre

Jack Ratz closes his eyes and he is a boy again, running with his brothers along the 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. 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 in 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, he 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 writes about being loaded onto a boat in Riga 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. But on Nov. 29, 1941, the Nazis separated males older than 16 from their families. Ratz, 14 at the time, believed that 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.

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.

“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.