Blood in the Forest by Vincent Hunt;

Author:Vincent Hunt;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: HISTORY / Military / world War II
ISBN: 9781912866939
Publisher: Casemate Publishers & Book Distributors, LLC

In Liepāja city museum on a Saturday afternoon 70 years later I sit with Rita Krūmiņa, the Head of Collections, looking through photographs of Liepāja both during the war and before it. The first pictures we look at show a street with piles of rubble on either side.

‘That is Vītolu iela [Willow Street] where many of the Jews lived,’ says Rita.

‘It was badly bombed, as you can see. These pictures date from 1941 when the Germans invaded. The story goes that Vītolu iela was deliberately targeted by Nazi bombers because many Jews lived there’.

The next collection dates from 1945, at the end of the war. There don’t seem to be any pictures between 1941 and 1945. There are groups of men repairing railway lines and piles of rubble on street corners. I recognise Rose Square and the main street, Liela iela, where the tramlines still run today. I have just walked across there to get to the museum.

Rita opens another envelope and lays out more photographs.

‘These are the pre-war pictures,’ she says.

The contrast couldn’t be greater. The first card is of a tram turning onto a street full of shops bustling with people, opposite a tidy well-kept garden square. Another card, this time colour-tinted, shows the same scene from 1904. I recognise the church spire: I’m staying in the modern hotel that now stands in front of it.

‘That’s where the Liva Hotel is now,’ Rita says, as I nod in recognition. ‘Those buildings across the road were destroyed and the University was built on the block the tram is going past. It’s very different now’.

It’s completely different … it’s a different world. These pictures show people relaxing, shopping, trading. There are no cars. Men are wearing hats. There are flowerbeds, herbaceous borders and bushes in Rose Square. It looks like a charming place to pass half an hour chatting with friends.

This collection of turn of the century postcards of Liepāja – or Libau as it was known to the Germans – has survived because people posted them to their friends.

I turn one card over. It’s addressed to Fraulein Elsa Dumpoff in Riga, postmarked 7 October 1900. The postcard’s printed in Russian. In those days Latvia was part of the Russian Empire.

The next postcard I pick up was sent nearly forty years later to Ms Almiņa Lukševica at 2 Gaismais Street, Ventspils on 14 December 1939 – just a few months before the Russians moved in. It’s an end of an era postcard if ever there was one.

‘Hello Almiņa,’ the sender writes in pencil. ‘I’m sorry that I did not reply sooner. I didn’t have time’. The rest of the message is too difficult to read.

But the back of the card tells a story in itself. The stamp in the right hand corner celebrates the 20th anniversary of the Latvian Republic, 1918–1938, with a picture of the Commander in Chief of the Latvian armed forces, Jānis Balodis, in the centre. Behind him is Riga’s famous railway bridge with soldiers stationed on

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