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The Holocaust
I used to naively think that our family was lucky not to have been touched by the Holocaust.
If one checks the Yad Vashem website, the name Ichlov from Dvinsk, Latvia can be found. Now these may not be direct relatives of ours, but who knows......? I did not find any Ospowats or Becks from Latvia listed.
To check this, go to Yad Vashem page and check section
Click on this link and then type in "Ichlov" under family name and under location type in "Latvia"..
If one checks the Yad Vashem website, the name Ichlov from Dvinsk, Latvia can be found. Now these may not be direct relatives of ours, but who knows......? I did not find any Ospowats or Becks from Latvia listed.
To check this, go to Yad Vashem page and check section
Click on this link and then type in "Ichlov" under family name and under location type in "Latvia"..
Please consider supporting Yad Vashem by making a donation.
Click here to do this
Latvia during the Holocaust
After World War I I broke out Latvia was first occupied and later annexed by the Soviet Union, according to the terms of the Nazi - Soviet Pact. However, in June 1941 Germany attacked its former ally, the Soviet Union. Soviet-held territories like Latvia were immediately occupied by German troops. Incorporated into the reichskommissariat Ostland, Latvia became known as Generalbezirk Lettlend. A civil administration was appointed under D. Heinrich Drechsler and was made up of Latvians. At that point, some 70,000 Jews lived in Latvia.
At the end of July 1941, the mobile killing units of Einsatzgruppe A carried out the first mass murder of Jews in Latvia. From July to October 1941 some 34,000 Jews were massacred, including 4,000 inhabitants of Latvia's capital, Riga. At the end of October about 32,000 Jews from Riga were forced into two Ghettos. At the same time, higher SS and police leader Friedrich Jeckeln arrived to take over the extermination of the remaining Jews in Latvia. His orders, straight from SS chief Heinrich Himmler, were to "empty the ghetto." On November 30 and again on December 7, thousands of Jews were taken from the ghetto and shot to death in the Rumbala Forest. About 25,000 Jews were murdered in this Aktion, nicknamed the Jeckeln Aktion. The Jews imprisoned in the ghettos in Dvinsk and Liepaja were also annihilated in November and December 1941. A commando of Latvians under Viktor Arajs was responsible for the murder of many Latvian Jews.
In November about 20,000 Jews from Germany, Austria, and Czechoslovakia were brought to Latvia and moved into the Riga Ghetto in place of the Riga Jews who were being killed. A small number were used by the Germans as forced laborers, but the majority---some 14,000---were killed in the forests from January to July 1942, just like the Jews of Latvia.
By the beginning of 1943 only 5,000 Jews remained in Latvia, either in the ghettos or in a few Forced Labor Camps, such as Kaiserwald. That fall, the Jews that were left in the ghettos were moved to Kaiserwald. In the late summer of 1944, as the Soviet army drew near, the last Jews in Latvia were sent to camps in Germany; many died en route. By war's end, nearly all of the 70,000 Jews living in Latvia in 1941 had perished.
Israeli Archive and Google Team Up to Put Holocaust Stories at Fingertips
By Dina Kraft : NY Times : February 12, 2011
When Google, the world’s largest search engine, joined forces with Yad Vashem, keeper of the world’s largest Holocaust archive, the first thing one Google employee here did was search for his grandfather’s name.
A link took the employee, Doron Avni, to a Google-operated page on the Yad Vashem Web site showing a photograph of his grandfather, Yecheskel Fleischer, taken in 1941 just after he was released from a Nazi-run prison in Lithuania.
Under the photograph of his grandfather, then 27, dark-eyed and gaunt, Mr. Avni was able to type in details of his grandfather’s story. Icons on the page from Facebook, Twitter and other social media outlets allow for immediate sharing of the images and attached information.
“It’s a milestone that marks a new era in our ability to disseminate and bring useful accessibility to Yad Vashem’s databases,” said Avner Shalev, chairman of Yad Vashem, at a news conference last month at Google’s offices in central Tel Aviv.
Yad Vashem began digitizing its holdings in the 1990s and has an extensive Web site, but the technology of Google, and the expertise of a team of employees who have been working on the project for three years, will make the information easier to find in search engines.
The photographs have been scanned using optical character recognition, which identifies any text in the pictures, making it searchable. So if Mr. Avni’s grandfather’s name had not been listed in a document but had been inscribed on a photograph, whether in Latin or Hebrew letters, he would still have been found.
The first stage of the Holocaust memorial’s partnership with Google includes about 130,000 photographs in full resolution, hosted on a Google server, with the option for users to add commentary, including historical background and personal family stories. The long-term goal is to include Yad Vashem’s larger archive of millions of documents, including survivor testimonials, diaries, letters and manuscripts.
Two years ago Google and Yad Vashem began their first joint project, a YouTube channel for viewing Holocaust survivors’ testimonials.
John Palfrey, co-director of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard, said that although such public-private partnerships could make significant contributions, the private control of a public resource raised potential conflicts.
“Down the road this altruistic project could look different,” Mr. Palfrey said by phone from Cambridge, Mass. “I would say it’s a good thing that information is made available to the world, but many of us worry about the central role a company is playing in the preservation of the world’s cultural information.”
“It is about unknowns,” he said. “We don’t know where the corporate interest might get misaligned with the public interest down the line.” For now, the interests appear to have converged.
After viewing his grandfather’s photograph, Mr. Avni, the policy manager at Google’s research and development center in Israel, added comments about how his grandfather hid in the forests of Lithuania until the end of World War II, only to be discovered by Russian soldiers who initially mistook him for a German and wanted to kill him.
When the soldiers were presented with the same photograph, clearly identifying him as a Jew because his shirt bore the Star of David that Nazis forced Jews to wear, his life was spared.
“What my grandfather wanted was for the next generation to know about the Holocaust,” Mr. Avni said. “He would have been inspired by this, to know his message is now being communicated to so many people around the world.”