Latvia's tragic war 2: The silent scars .. Audrini's secrets revealed

From the sombre killing field of Ancupani, we drove two kilometres down country roads to Audrini. Ahead, on the right, a large statue marked the turn off for the town.

As in Ancupani, there's no public explanation of what happened here, or what this statue marks. Those who want to know have to do some research.

In December 1941, while Germany and the Soviet Union were at war, Soviet partisans hiding in the Latvian village of Audrini, then under German occupation, killed at least two Latvian police officers. As a reprisal for those killings and as a warning to other villages not to harbour Soviet partisans, the Nazis ordered swift and brutal retaliation: All the villagers of Audrini, some 200 to 300 men, women, and children, were arrested and shot, and their village was burned to the ground. 


Boleslavs Maikovskis, a Latvian native, had been installed by the Nazis as chief of a police precinct for the area that included Audrini. Maikovskis ordered his Latvian police officers to assist German soldiers in arresting the villagers and burning their town. It is not clear whether he or his police officers played any role in shooting the villagers.


At the time of the Nazi Germany invasion of the Soviet Union, Maikovskis lived in Rezekne. In July 1941, German forces reached Rezekne and established a local Latvian police unit under the command of the SS. Maikovskis volunteered for and obtained the position of Chief of the Second Police Precinct of the Rezekne District for the Nazi-created police force, a full-time job he held from about July 1941 until 1944.

Maikovskis was responsible for an area that included the village of Audrini, which had an ethnic Russian population of the Orthodox faith believed by the Germans to be inclined toward Communism. In December 1941, altercations occurred between Latvian police and Soviet partisans believed to be harbored in Audrini, and at least two Latvian police officers were killed.

Nazi authorities ordered that action be taken against Audrini, and, on or about December 22, 1941, Maikovskis ordered his Latvian police to join with German soldiers in arresting all of the Audrini villagers, totaling 200-300 men, women, and children; on or about January 2, 1942, pursuant to Maikovskis's orders, his policemen assisted the Germans in burning the village to the ground. 

Maikovskis testified that he had had no choice but to order the mass arrests and burning of the village because the Nazis, through his Latvian superior, had ordered him to do so. Subsequently, in events with which Maikovskis denies involvement, about 30 of the Audrini villagers were publicly shot in the Rezekne market square, and the remaining villagers were transported to the nearby Anchupani Hills where they too were shot.

(from an appeal against deportation to the US Appeal Court, Board of Immigration 1985 by Boleslavs Maikovskis: 

http://bulk.resource.org/courts.gov/c/F2/773/773.F2d.435.84-4143.674.html)

There's a plaque in the town square - in reality, little more than a small car park - which details the bare facts of the Audrini incident, along with a map which shows the road that the villagers would have been marched along to their deaths. As I remember there's also a plaque by the Post Office (now closed) which lists the names of the villagers, but in Russian, and that at least a dozen of the victims, maybe more, had the same family name.

I asked our friend who lived in Audrini nowadays. He said: "Russians".. but not knowing the facts of the massacre, we didn't stop any of the few people around to ask them what it's like living in Audrini today.

It's a strange place: a mixture of ancient wooden houses - probably dating back to 1945 though, no later - with a scattering of three to five storey Russian-built flats. 

It would be inapppropriate to say the town has seen better days, but the recession has forced the closure of the Post Office and the nearest place to get a stamp is all the way into Rezekne. There's not much going on, apart from the odd dog barking.

In one final research sweep for this article, to try to confirm the number of Soviet POWs executed in the Ancupani hills (18,000 according to one contemporary account), I came across this Russian website:

http://www.russkije.lv/en/lib/read/the-tragedy-of-audrini.html

which may hold the secret to all this. It gives perhaps the simplest account of why such a terrible fate befell Audrini.


The village of Audriņi in Eastern Latvia, populated chiefly by Russian Old Believers, was burnt in January 1942 by local collaborators, and 215 of its inhabitants were shot. The reason for this bloody act – one of the women from the village, Anisya Glushneva, had concealed her son, a Red Army soldier, and five of his comrades. When they were discovered by policemen they put up resistance, killing several of them. The chief of the German security police gave the order to ‘wipe the village of Audriņi off the face of the earth’. The Nazi policeman-collaborant Boļeslavs Maikovskis was put in charge of this action. 30 residents of Audriņi were shot on the market square in Rēzekne, the others in the Ančupāni hills. The village of Barsuki in the Lūdza District suffered a similar fate.

So in its simplest terms, a mother's love was the catalyst for Audrini being wiped out.

Reading about Lidice I saw a sentence which said the Nazis chose to boast about Lidice to show the brutality of their reprisals against those who chose to act against them (1,300 deaths for the assassination of the very senior Nazi Heydrich), but - tellingly - other massacres were kept secret. 

Because of the Nazi propaganda, Lidice was picked up immediately by the Allies. The liquidation of Audrini was known locally but doesn't seem to have reached a wider audience. Try googling both.

So why is this? Perhaps amid the horrors of the discovery of the concentration camps, the euphoria of the ending of the war, the division of Europe between Russians and Allies along pre-agreed lines and the probably daily discovery of yet another act of barbarism, the wiping out of 200 men, women and children suspected of harbouring Soviet partisans was a mere drop in the ocean on the atrocity scale.

My Latvian friend's resigned sigh - "but this happened everywhere" - seems to be borne out. But awful as it is, Audrini is nothing compared to the horrors of the Holocaust to be uncovered in Rezekne.

The forests hide deep secrets...Ancupani

I think it was my sixth visit to Latvia when I realised that I was actually quite puzzled that there was very little evidence of all the terrible things that have happened there in the past century. There are very few memorials, for instance. And on closer inspection, the ones there are don't tell either the full or the true picture.

Most of them, like this liberation monument in the eastern city of Rezekne, were put there by the Russians. This one reminds Latvians who it was that liberated them, in a tone suggesting they would do well to remember that.

While the Russians certainly pushed back the Nazis and ended the wholesale slaughter of the city's Jews (more on this later), it ushered in fifty years of suppression which smothered discussion of what really happened in Rezekne (more on this too.)

The truth is that Russians and Germans alike slaughtered Latvians in their tens of thousands. I'm not Russian and I'm not German: I don't have an axe to grind or points to score against this or that murderous totalitarian regime. I'm an English journalist married to a Latvian and in my visits to a country I never expected to go to I have stumbled across episodes of history that have shocked me. And I might add, I've seen a few things already: Rwanda, South Africa, Northern Ireland, Germany.

I was shocked firstly because of what happened in Latvia - virtually everywhere - and secondly, because no-one seems to want to remember.

I said to one Latvian friend: "Why isn't there a memorial there to this shocking thing that happened?". To which she replied: "It wasn't the only place that it happened. These terrible things happened in lots of places."
I guess that might be one explanation.
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A friend in Rezekne offered to show us round the city. After we'd looked at the castle and the market and the bus station he said: "Would you like to see the forest where the Germans took a whole village and shot everybody?" A little taken aback, because this wasn't something I knew about, we drove a short way out of town. He led us along a path and into the forest for a short way until we reached a clearing.

"Here it is," he said. "Here WHAT is?" I replied, not sure what he'd brought us to.
"This is where the Germans machine-gunned all the villagers," he said. There were fresh roses and floral tributes - at Easter 2012, seventy years later.

But no information.

"This is Ancupani," he said. "The Germans marched 200 people from a nearby village, including children, and shot them."
At Ancupani, there's not a word of this. Ancupani was where the inhabitants of the nearby village of Audrini paid the price for Soviet partisans shooting two Latvian policemen, in January 1942.
The chief of police Boleslavs Maikovskis ordered everyone to be arrested after the two policemen were shot, and the village was burned down. The 215 villagers, including 53 children, were then executed here.
The savage reprisal was ordered because Audrini was known to harbour Soviet
partisans.


On the wall of the memorial garden at the end of the execution site are mounted the words 'Vini mira lai dzivotu tu' - They died so you can live.

The doorway leads through to a staircase rising to a stark, simple garden, with no flowers or decoration, simply a statue of a mother with a baby holding an apple in her hand.

The child's outstretched hands seem to emphasise the brutality of what happened here.


And again, there's no explanation of why this statue is here. Not in Latvian, Russian, German or English, like the information boards you find outside Catholic churches or manor houses in some Latvian provinces.

One of those wreaths by the feet of the mother mentions Lidice, the Czech town wiped out in June 1942 in a Nazi reprisal for the killing of the brute Heydrich. The whole world knows of Lidice: its very name a byword for terror, synonymous with mass Nazi murder and cold, callous reprisals. I've never heard of Audrini but the same thing happened here - five months before - by murderers reporting to the same bosses.

Ancupani's forests of death

It's like this all over Latvia. There were massacres everywhere but the fact that Audrini and Ancupani don't rate even a matter-of-fact plaque left me feeling quite shocked. Surely people can't just shrug and say: "Well, this happened everywhere. There's nothing particularly special about this." Can they?

Ancupani was the accidental starting point for my brief journey into the wartime horror of Latvia, with killers German and Russian alike, who divided the country up as the spoils of war then set about murdering everyone in it, or deporting them to slave labour camps.

The sad thing that makes it all so much worse - and I haven't even mentioned the mass murder of possibly 18,000 Russian PoWs, thousands of Jews and an uncounted number of Roma here yet - is that there's not a word that says what happened here.

Time and again, when I see those trees, I know that Latvia's forests hide deep and very dark secrets.

SOURCES: Latvia in World War II By Valdis O. Lumans

http://www.eurekaencyclopedia.com/index.php/Category:20th_Century_Occupations

Painters from the past..

So that's where I've been the past four months, not blogging. In the end I asked the builders to get to a certain point in the renovation and then stop, because I was spending shedloads of money without really considering what I was doing.

I like to know the corners of my house and what's around me. I'm planning on spending a large part of my life living here and while I'd love it to be clean and comfortable, part of the journey is in making it yours.

When I began stripping the old paper off the walls I came across a strange, almost ghostly experience. There were messages written on the walls underneath the paper that hadn't been seen by anyone for seventy years. Spooky.

Here's the painter, Albert Taylor, signing the bedroom wall.

Then underneath either he or one of his mates has dated the message
3rd June 1938 and added: 'NICE DAY' and then to the left, perhaps as
an after thought .. 'GORTON'.. maybe he lived there.

Painting the bedroom must have taken a couple of days - it certainly took ME a couple of days - because close by on the wall there's another message.
'June 6 1938: Foggy all day'

Then - and this is what made me laugh so much - there's a response
separated by 20 years. Another decorator has left his own message on the wall, again in pencil, almost as if to stay in keeping with Albert Taylor's message: 'Jan 1958 - still foggy'

It was almost a shame to interrupt these messages from the past by painting over them. I guess in the days when these guys were decorators you papered the bedroom to keep it a bit warmer, and so the messages stayed on the walls. But considering that we're only the third people in this house in the 90 years since it was built, we're not far from the original stuff considering that the last guy lived here for fifty years.

Albert certainly left his mark on the house. On the wall in the front room downstairs I found instructions in thick pencil: 'ALL WOODWORK DEEP CREAM.'
And so it was. The last guy just slapped more on top of that. I've spent the past four months burning it back to the wood.

Now for some decorating...

People say the three most stressful things in life are getting married, moving house, or someone dying. Well, I didn't find getting married too stressful - did I?
I've moved literally several dozen times in my life. I've had 25 addresses in as many years.. and I lived at the last place for a decade. Moving house is stressful because of all the other people involved in it.
This time moving wasn't stressful because of the move itself: that went pretty much like clockwork. It was all the repairs and the renovation..THAT was a nightmare.

 Take the front bedroom upstairs, for example. Rain had been leaking in for YEARS. When we peeled off the wallpaper all the plaster fell off too. We decided to re-wire, re-plaster and just get to the bottom of what turned out to be a very serious case of neglect.

In the kitchen we took out a chimney breast where an Aga had once been, shifted the boiler -
shifted everything in fact - and redesigned the rectangular space in a sort of U-shape.
This needed all kinds of supports, steel inserts and structural calculations by an engineer after the boys had made short work of the chimney breast with a sledgehammer.

The dust was gritty, dirty stuff that gets into your skin and grinds away. Before long we were all showing skin problems - me especially.

My skin was just splitting open, especially on my fingers. I did a gig around this time and during the soundcheck my fingers started to crack and bleed while I was playing.Yuk.



While we had the sledgehammer out we also converted a double window into a double door at the back of the house.. a few strokes is all that's needed.

While the khaki was awful and condemned anyway, we didn't expect the plaster on either side of the wall to collapse when we removed bathroom tiles and wallpaper. But it did.

Plaster board is wonderful stuff, you know.

All this is happening while we're trying to live and work in this house and while Martins is starting at a new school! Yeah, and it's pouring down with rain every day for ten weeks and the bill is going up and up and up....

We made Martins' bedroom a priority so he could settle down quickly in the new house, and a generous application of plaster board, laminate floor and Manchester City-coloured paint has given him a bedroom any teenager would surely be proud of.

And we called a halt in time for Christmas so we could enjoy a happy time in our new home....

Martins likes his new room

Daiga and Kristine masterminded the menu

Groaning with goodies....

The End... (except it wasn't, because the builders started again a week after New Year...)

At the Gates of Babylon - Berlin 3

The Ishtar Gate: impressive

The sense of history that pervades Berlin is not all Fuhrer Bunkers and Reichstags. The German capital is home to one of the most amazing collections of architecture from antiquity.

One enduring memory from my previous visit to Berlin in 1992 was seeing the Gates of Ishtar, one of the routes into Babylon. On my visit earlier in 2011 the Pergamon Museum where these treasures are displayed was absolutely packed, so I seized the chance to go back.

The Pergamon Museum sits on an island of three museums, around the corner from the Unter den Linden and the Berlin Cathedral. It was built to house the vast amount of relics excavated throughout the ancient world by German archaeologists between 1899 and 1917, and while there’s always the problem of the stuff not actually being where it should, it is an impressive collection.

The Ishtar Gate (left) was the eighth gate leading into the ancient city of Babylon, built in 575 BC on the orders of King Nebuchadnezzar. It was glazed in blue tiles decorated with lions on glazed bricks and has been restored to how it once looked – it’s an amazing construction.

The Gate straddled the Processional Way into Babylon along which statues of gods were paraded on feast days and the New Year celebrations. It’s difficult to get a sense of the size of the Gate from photographs.. this video helps convey the scale:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9kGxDHB_wvU

Detail of the lions decorating the Processional Way

The Babylon collection raises a number of questions in my mind. How could so little remain of a city so fabled, so central to the ancient world? In-fighting following the death of its final conqueror, Alexander the Great, meant that Babylonian fortunes took a severe downturn from 275 BC onwards. 

Babylonians were forcibly removed to another city. The change in the course of the river took out one side of the city. And the Tower of Babel and the legendary Hanging Gardens? It seems likely that the Gardens were exactly that: a legend. 

The Hanging Gardens of Babylon were considered to be one of the original Seven Wonders of the Ancient World. They were supposedly built by the Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar II around 600 BC for his homesick wife, Amytis of Media, who longed for the trees and fragrant plants of her homeland Persia.  

A Processional Way of lions from Babylon

No contemporary accounts of them exist, nor any archaeological evidence and the noted writer Herodotus, source of choice for most students of antiquity, doesn’t mention them. It’s likely the Gardens weren’t in Babylon but actually in Nineveh. 

The Tower of Babel was probably a ziggurat or tower in a temple complex, destroyed during a rebuilding attempt by Alexander the Great, whose death halted the project. The base remains, visible from Google Earth, which places its location at 32.5362583°N 44.4208252°E just south of Baghdad. (source Wikipaedia)

  

Here’s a good feature about the Gardens: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cDY5q2mMiTM&feature=related

The latest indignity meted out to Babylon has been a good stomping at the hands of US troops occupying the area after the fall of Saddam, who 'restored' Babylon, using bricks stamped with his name. 

Unimaginable damage has been caused to the site, which now houses a helipad and a parking lot. Good job, guys.

An afternoon in the Death Strip

(

I suppose a time will come when no one remembers the Berlin Wall or the division of the city into Occupied Zones. 

I was 23 when I first went to Berlin – to play there in my band, A Witness – and it was still divided then. We took a U-bahn to the East and were amazed to see a city free of advertising hoards and yes, the shelves in the shops really WERE bare. I would swear you could still see bullet holes in the walls.

 But I guess we didn't really think too deeply about what day to day life was actually like for East Germans or what that regime was ACTUALLY doing to its own people. It's only since I've been travelling to the East a lot that I've stopped to think about this in depth, and read some of the stories. It's pretty bad.

I didn’t have time last time I was in Berlin to visit the preserved areas of The Wall. I was too busy wandering round Alexanderplatz and Checkpoint Charlie muttering to myself in amazement.

It might have been twenty years ago but it all seemed SO LONG AGO. Berlin? Divided? Unthinkable nowadays. And all those poor buggers trying to crash through checkpoints in Trabants, pole vault the Wall or swim across the Baltic just to get away? Oh my God. What right did these people have to keep an entire population prisoner?

The sections of The Wall that have been preserved make for a fascinating afternoon imaging how miserable life could be. 

The first picture shows visitors hecking out the space that used to be where the wall was: the second photograph shows what went into that space. 

This is the Original Death Strip: landmines, machine guns, trip wires, floodlights, dogs.

I’m sure sprinters will have looked across this pace and thought: ‘Ten seconds. That’s all I need’ but those walls are pretty high.

Walking along the Wall is a strange but sobering experience. At intervals there are monuments to people who tried to escape the East and were shot down, or were fatally injured, by the rifle-toting East German guards.

To get a better look at the dimensions of everything I climbed up the three storey watchtower across the road, which doubles as a visitor and research centre. 

One corner of the city block it faces is a road leading into the heart of Berlin, a well-known pre-war route into the centre, first damaged by the war and the bombing, blocked off by the Russians, then bricked up by the East regime. 

It really is like someone built a 10 foot wall across your local main road and put armed guards on it. 

Who then really DID shoot your mum and dad.

World War Three nearly broke out in Berlin because this wall was a line in the sand. American and Soviet tanks came face to face at Checkpoint Charlie: this stretch of wall was where a lot of escape attempts were made. And I guess none more famous than East German soldier Conrad Schumann who saw the wall going up in 1961 and clearly saw the writing on it.

Here’s the place where he did it (left) at the corner of Bernauer Strasse, and here’s an account of his defection:

“On 15 August 1961, Schumann was sent to the corner of Ruppiner Straße and Bernauer Straße to guard the Berlin Wall on its third day of construction. At that time, the wall was only a low barbed wire fence. 

From the other side, West Germans shouted to him, "Komm rüber!" ("Come over!"), and a police car pulled up to wait for him. 

Schumann jumped over the barbed wire fence and was promptly driven away from the scene by the West Berlin police. West German photographer Peter Leibing photographed Schumann's escape, and this picture has since become an iconic image of the Cold War era.” (source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conrad_Schumann)

Sadly Conrad suffered from depression and hanged himself in 1998 aged 56.

To the left of the picture is a U-bahn that was closed through the Cold War, bricked and boarded up, finding itself at the epicentre of the Superpower confrontation. It’s open now, and all very normal. 

East Looking West.. watch the watchtower

I wish I could say that about all of Berlin, but there’s just something skewed about a place that’s seen so much history.. the sense of bad things happening in days gone by just never seems to leave me, whether it’s the Wall, or the Alexanderplatz, or the Unter den Linden leading down to the Brandenburg Gate and the Reichstag. 

Berlin is a fantastic, matchless city with history everywhere. There's still one post in this blog which will deal with the visit I made to the Pergamon Museum, revisiting the Babylon exhibition I last saw in 1992 when it had only recently reopened. Germans and archaeology go together like dal and chapattis. That Pergamon Museum, on the island of museums, is well worth a visit.

Once again I didn’t get through enough Berlin and I need to go back: next time I’m checking out the Tempelhof area and having a look at the Airlift in a bit more detail.

Three Must-See Sights of Berlin - A Four Strings Good special (1)

Berlin is an endlessly fascinating city, a treasure trove of history. But sometimes that history tells of unimaginable loss and death on a scale that’s hard to digest.

The gigantic Soviet war memorial in Treptower Park is a monument to the death and destruction involved in the savage fight to snuff out the Nazis at the end of World War Two.

The memorial - Sowjetisches Ehrenmal in Pushkinallee -  lies to the east of Berlin in the area where the workers’ rising of 1919 took place, led by among others Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg. I’m told it’s always been a Red area and that German Communists used to meet up there in the 1930s before doing battle with the National Socialists, who were quickly becoming a force in the country.

I have been to many war cemeteries and all share the same air of dignified mourning and respect for the loss. But Treptower Park is a huge open air arena of loss, a stadium of mourning, on a scale which in a way matches the blood shed in the Battle for Berlin, which effectively won the war.

According to figures displayed on information boards in the park, between April 16th and May 2^nd 1945, more than 70,000 people were killed in Berlin alone in the final phase of the Second World War. As the Russians tightened their stranglehold on Berlin, 22,000 Soviet and 20,000 German soldiers died, along with 30,000 civilians. The war in total claimed a mind-boggling FIFTY MILLION lives, 25 million of whom were Russian.

Historian Anthony Beevor puts the total dead in the Battle for Berlin at 250,000, with 50,000 German soldiers and civilians wiped out in a massacre at Halbe alone: http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/worldwars/wwtwo/berlin_01.shtml)

From the banks of the Spree I entered through a vast arch, framing a path into the centre of the park. Turning to the left is a granite statue of Mother Russia grieving for her lost children. A vast concourse is flanked by two huge statues of kneeling soldiers in battle dress holding submachine guns, heads bowed alongside dipped Soviet flags.

The memorial opens out across a sunken plaza lined by 16 marble sarcophagi representing the 16 Soviet republics engaged in the vicious struggle against the Nazi Germany. Each is carved with an inscription from Stalin and a relief showing images of the treatment meted out by Germans to the republics. 

There was no love lost in this vicious fight between ideologies once Hitler ordered Soviet political commissars to be shot out of hand, and their response was just as ruthless. Five thousand Soviet dead from the Battle for Berlin are buried inside this corridor of coffins.

The focal point of the park is a colossal statue 13 metres high of a triumphant Russian soldier holding a child while his sword rests on a broken swastika.


Climbing the steps up to the base of the statue reveals a small memorial crypt lit with candles and even now strewn with red roses, a reminder that this is still a memorial used to this day to commemorate the fallen.






Scenes from the sarcophagi lining the sunken area:

Russian retribution, with a mortar team attacking.

Sacrifice in battle.

Suffering on the  home front.










Turning to see the vast sunken garden with the corridor of coffins and above that the stone soldiers kneeling in respect to their dead comrades framed by the dipped flags is quite emotional…  and yet not triumphal or religious. With the sun going down as I walked through the park it's a reminder of the price the world paid to bring the war to an end... and no wonder the Russians were determined to hold on to what they'd fought for.

The Youtube video I have added a link to below gives a good idea of the human scale of this memorial in a way the pictures can’t.

The scale is massive. The symmetry is humbling, poignant and mournful. The loss this park expresses is gigantic. Whether so much blood needed to be spilt securing Berlin is another, possibly political, argument.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AFEHHCJysmA

PS: For those considering a visit to Berlin, here’s a guide to some of the ‘alternative’ sights of the city I came across while researching these posts.

http://www.berlinfo.com/Traveltime/Sights/sights/divided_city/index.htm