Endless Miracles

Memoirs of a Jew born in Riga in 1927. Pp. 19-90 recount his experiences in the Holocaust, including the massacres which took place, with Latvian collaboration, immediately after the German occupation in July 1941. Discusses the large ghetto and the small ghetto, where Ratz was taken with other able-bodied males. The large ghetto was liquidated, with thousands of Riga's Jews, including Ratz's mother and three of his brothers, who were shot in the Rumbuli Forest. Ratz survived the war in the company of his father, spending 17 months in the Lenta labor camp, where the commander, Fritz Scherwitz (or Eleke Sirewitz), was actually a Jew who hid his identity and helped the prisoners. Ratz spent a week in the Salaspils concentration camp and survived two death marches. He was taken by ship to Stutthof and then to the camps of Burggraben and Gotendorf, where he was liberated by the Russians. After the war he emigrated to the U.S., where he aided fellow survivors, e.g. in the Jewish Survivors of Latvia organization, and spoke at many schools.