Quote: On just two days of November and December 1941 27,800 Jews, mostly from the Riga ghetto, were marched in columns to Rumbula Forest, ordered to place their clothes and valuables in collection boxes, lined up in single file, and shot. Executions went on throughout the day. The dead piled up in freshly dug pits, one on top of another. There were only three survivors. Two years later, worried about leaving evidence behind, the Nazi authorities ordered the bodies to be burnt.

In the mid-1960s local activists erected the first makeshift memorial at the site of the massacre. It was the first such monument to the Jewish victims of the Nazis anywhere in the USSR. The Soviet authorities ordered the wooden sign be removed. Soon another replaced it. During the 1970s the sites of mass graves were marked with raised earth.

With the end of the Soviet occupation the Latvian government finally built a permanent memorial, dedicated in 2002. At its centre is a seven-branched Jewish menorah, surrounded by small stones bearing the names of 1,300 of the victims. The rest are left empty, awaiting recognition. A path lined with benches leads through the grave sites, still raised from the ground and now marked with boulders. A memorial marker at the roadside entrance displays the path - the same route as the marchers took to their graves. An inscribed marble slab nearby records the numbers and dates of the dead, killed by "the Nazis and their local collaborators". Above, the pine trees are silent. The only noise comes from the road. It's a bleak and harrowing place. But it's a place that everyone should see, to remember, to reflect, and in the words the Latvian president used when she dedicated the memorial, "to see that this will never happen again".

The memorial site is easily reached by train from the capital. Take one of the regular trains on the Salaspils - Ogre - Lielvarde line and get off at Rumbula station (1 lat return). After leaving the train, walk to the end of the platform in the direction you came from and then follow the side of the tracks for around 100 metres until you see the memorial marker and staircase on your left. If you're driving from Riga, there's a small carpark at the entrance - look out for the metal scuplture marking the turn-off from the road.
The concentration camp at Salaspils is three kilometres further on, near the next stop on the Lielvarde line (Darzini).


From journals Day Trips Out Of Riga