George D. Schwab
George D. Schwab (M / Latvia, 1931), Holocaust survivor
- <Liepaja Ghetto> <Stutthof>
Biography
NOTES : George Schwab, born in 1931 in Liepaja, Latvia, discusses his childhood; hearing the first reports of persecutions against Jews in Germany and Austria and dismissing them; the feeling in Latvia that the Soviet Union would protect them; the confiscation of his family's apartment and of his father's medical practice after the Soviet invasion; deportations to Siberia before Germany declared war on the Soviet Union; harsh treatment of the Jewish population of Liepaja after the German occupation; his father's arrest, torture, and death; moving into the Liepaja ghetto with his mother and older brother; being deported to Kaiserwald concentration camp; his and his mother's deportation to the Stutthof concentration camp in 1944; his transfer to Stolp, Germany (present day Slupsk, Poland) to work on a railroad; returning to Stutthof and then being evacuated by boat; being abandoned by the German guards while sailing on the North Sea; landing in Holstein, Germany and being discovered by the German Navy; his liberation by British troops; his hospitalization in Holstein; being transferred to a Latvian children's home and running away from the home to a displaced persons camp in Neustadt, Germany and then to Berlin, Germany; his contact with relatives in England and the United States and reuniting with his mother; spending time in the Schlachtensee displaced persons camp; and immigrating with his mother to the United States.
British Association for Holocaust Studies
In 1935, 94,000 Jews lived in Latvia, accounting for approximately 5% of the population. The Soviet Union occupied Latvia in June 1940 and annexed the country in August of that year. In June and July 1941, following the German invasion of the Soviet Union, the Germans occupied Latvia. Units of the Einsatzgruppen, in co-ordination with the Latvian and Lithuanian auxiliaries, massacred nearly all the Jews in Latvia. Ghettos were established in the larger cities of Riga, Dvinsk, and Liepāja (also known as Libau).
George survived internment in the Libau ghetto, as well as imprisonment in Stutthof concentration camp. His father was publicly tortured and later shot as part of the mass killing actions in Libau, as were many of his family members. After the war, George was reunited with his mother, and moved to the United States, where he earned his PhD from Columbia University and taught History in New York. He still resides there today.
Incredibly, George went on to co-found the National Committee on American Foreign Policy in 1974, serving as its President from 1993-2014. He served on several committees of the Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C., and the Latvian President’s Commission of International Historians. In 2002, he received the Order of the Three Stars, Latvia’s highest honour, in a ceremony held in Riga.
Thank you so much for sharing your story with me, George. I understand that you were born in Libau (Liepāja), Latvia in 1931. Can you tell me a little bit about your childhood and Jewish life in your town before the Soviet occupation?
I was fortunate to have been born in one of Libau’s exclusive apartment buildings. Being the son of a father who was a pre-World War I Berlin-trained gastroenterologist and a mother who was a professional cellist prior to her marriage, and having an older brother was bliss. But life in Libau was wonderful in the summer and largely boring in the winter.
Summer months were spent swimming in the invigorating Baltic Sea, both in Libau and Jurmala, near Riga, playing tennis at the Jewish tennis courts in Libau, visiting Libau’s Jewish Yacht Club, and eating in the many wonderful cafés. I spent time with relatives and friends, also visiting Riga’s zoo. What was most important in the summer: I was not burdened with school, homework and piano lessons.
Leaving cosmopolitan Riga for sleepy Libau at the end of summer was sad. After learning the alphabet and to count to 100, I informed my parents that school is boring and I had no intention to do homework; after three school years I failed every subject save English. I had my own life to lead, which was to have a good time and play games. Curiously, my parents did not pressure me to work hard in school.
To speak English was to be “with it”. Both my brother and I had a private tutor: once in school I corrected the English teacher – telling her “yes” is pronounced “yes” and not “yas”. As a punishment, she gave me a B rather than an A for the semester. Mother forced me to play the piano and for nearly five years I had to play classical music by obscure composers such as Beethoven and Brahms instead of the kind of music I liked – for example, the ‘Lambeth Walk’.
The Christmas trips to Riga were exciting because we attended performances for children at the Opera and, of course, spent time at Café Otto Schwarz. I immensely enjoyed aunts, uncles and family friends talking about life in faraway capitals like Berlin, Vienna, Paris and London. Much to look forward to.
What was life like for the family after the Soviet occupation in 1940? As I understand it, your father lost his medical practice.
My idyllic childhood was suddenly disrupted with the occupation of Latvia by the Soviet Union. Freedom of speech was curtailed, and for fear that I might reveal anti-Soviet talk between my parents, they now switched from Germany into Russian – of which I only had a rudimentary knowledge – much more often than before.
Not long after the occupation we were expelled from our apartment – the building was turned into the headquarters of the Communist Party – and were forced to move to a much smaller one near the hay market. Food rationing was introduced, as were price controls.
Father was assigned to a position in a hospital and was permitted to have patients privately consult him, but not allowed to use his X-ray and diathermy machines, which were stored in the apartment amongst other equipment.
In school we were constantly bombarded with talk about the grandeur of Stalin and Lenin and the heroic people of the Soviet Union who toiled in factories and on the land – all the time singing Russian songs. I was among a small number of students in my class who refused to join the Pioneers – the Soviet Youth movement.
One week prior to the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union, thousands of people were hauled off in cattle cars and transported deep into Russia. This, in particular, turned the Latvian population into Communist haters and, in the following weeks, also into antisemites because Nazi propaganda equated antisemitism with Bolshevism.
The Germans occupied Latvia in June of 1941. In July, a ‘mass Aktion’ was initiated by the Nazis, and took place against the Jews in Liepāja. What do you remember about this particular day, when your father was arrested? Can you tell us about what happened to him?
Father left in the morning with my brother Bubi, wearing his Red Cross armband, for Fireman’s Square, where Jewish males assembled for work assignments. Noticing in the distance the approaching notorious green SD trucks – the trucks that transported Jews to the women’s prison and from there to the killing grounds near the light tower – Father motioned to the Jews to scatter. He was caught, horribly beaten, kicked, had one eye knocked out by the SD man Erich Handke, thrown half-dead onto one of the SD trucks, and then down the stairs into the prison’s basement. And from there, he was taken to the light tower to be shot dead.
Your father’s story is quite well documented. He must have been a very well-known figure in the town. How did your family learn of his fate at the time?
We first heard of this horror from a Latvian patient who ran to inform Mother of what had happened. In the coming days the same story was recounted by Jewish eyewitnesses. [A witness described George’s father beginning to be killed, as he searched the prison grounds for his missing eye. Because the eye socket did not heal, he was killed instead].
I had never seen Mother, always composed, go berserk. I could not grasp the fact that I would never see my father again. We were lucky that Bubi (my brother) was still around and he assumed the role of ‘pater familias’.
Why do you think your father received this particular type of treatment, as opposed to the fate of shooting – as shared by the thousands of others?
The Nazis zeroed in on the intelligentsia first. My father, a highly educated individual, was the first in Latvia to use insulin in the treatment of diabetes. This legacy had to be erased from the annals of history, just as Mendelssohn’s name was not to be spoken or his music performed, or that Heinrich Heine could not be credited as the poet of ‘Die Lorelei’ – Germany’s most famous folklore.
Did the Nazis mostly target men, rather than women and children?
Initially only men were targeted. By December 1941, women and children shared the same fate.
What happened in the days immediately following the mass Aktion?
In the days following Father’s beating and imprisonment, Mother ran around town trying to mobilize the help of prominent Latvians to intercede in securing Father’s release from prison – he was kept in the prison for several weeks before he was shot dead. She even had the nerve to go to the SD to speak with Handke, who promised that Father would be released once a wound of his had healed. But he was shot dead.
Can you tell me about what life was like for you in the Libau Ghetto? What were the living conditions like, and what was daily life like there for you as a small child?
I was incarcerated in the Libau ghetto. Because of my fluency in German, I was reassigned from my vegetable garden job to become the runner of the ghetto commandant. I was basically his messenger boy, carrying mail and packages out of and into the ghetto.
In the ghetto my mother, brother, his wife and I were assigned to share a four bedroom basement apartment with six other people. Because Mother was working as a housekeeper for the mistress of the head of the SD, she was able to bring some food into the ghetto, which enabled us to not go to bed hungry.
Your mother also had an interesting experience working for the SD’s Latvian mistress. Could you tell us a little bit about that?
Before the war, Mother shared the same beauty parlour with a Mrs. Kronberg – the future mistress of Wolfgang Kügler, the head of the SD. She insisted that Mother became her housekeeper, and Mother was transferred from her previous work station and the Lufftwaffe (Air Force) where she had worked as a laundress. Working for Mrs. Kronberg had its advantages. Mother was able to slip food to fellow workers at the SD, which was located in a villa about twenty-five metres from the family home where Mrs. Kronberg resided. Furthermore, when imminent danger loomed, Mrs. Kronberg suggested to Mother that she bring me to her apartment upstairs for the day. When major actions against Jews were planned, she secured imposing-looking SD letters stating that the Schwabs not be touched because of the vital work they were performing for the war effort.
Of course, this all stopped after we were shipped from Libau to the Kaiserwald concentration camp in Riga. ____________________________________
On Yom Kippur in 1943, the Nazis in Libau loaded the remaining Jews from the ghetto into cattle cars destined for the Kaiserwald concentration camp in Riga. Here, children could easily be selected to be killed and public executions became common. George was clever enough to stand on sand piles to appear taller than he was during roll calls. George and his older brother worked at the Reichsbahn outcamp, repairing the German railroads. After returning to the barracks one day, they were told to undress and get in line. They were then examined by a Nazi SS doctor who sent them either to the left or right. George’s brother Bernhard was sent to the left. George, then only 12 years old, was then transported to Stuffhof concentration camp. _____________________________________
What happened to you when you arrived at Stutthof concentration camp?
My brother was killed in Riga shortly before we were transported from Riga to Stutthof at the end of August or beginning of September 1944. Life in Stutthof was terribly difficult: bunk beds in unheated barracks; poor sanitary facilities; no hot water. Breakfast was a slice of bread – often mouldy – with a little margarine, substitute jam and a little coffee, watery soup for lunch with a slice of bread, and watery soup for supper too. Roll call took place after breakfast or sometimes before, followed by work assignments. I was usually assigned to a group that built railway tracks near the gas chamber.
About two weeks after reaching Stutthof, I was sent to a work camp in Stolp, Pomerania. There, at the Reichsbahn, I became a carpenter repairing cattle cars (at the concentration camp in Riga, I also worked on the Reichsbahn next to my brother as an electrician repairing electrical systems in battery driven railroad cars). No wonder that Hitler lost the war!
Who was Julius, and how did he help you?
After I was separated from my mother and brother, Julius Goldberg came over to me and said “I will look after you,” which he did. On the day of liberation, 3 May 1945, I begged him to let me die, as I no longer had the strength for another death march, following nearly two weeks on a barge fleeing the advancing Soviet armies. Himself terribly weakened, in addition to have been bitten by a German police dog, he helped me march several miles to a German U-Boat school in Neustadt, Holstein, where we were liberated a few hours later by the British military.
Can you tell me a bit about how it felt to be liberated, and how you were reunited with your mother?
Free, but what now? The U-Boat school was turned into a huge Displaced Persons camp where I lived, was hospitalized twice suffering extreme bodily weakness, and I turned into a street boy – gambling, black marketing and trying to forget the dismal war years. After amassing some money, I decided to see the world and with a small suitcase made my way to Hamburg. At the bombed-out main railway station, I did not know what to do and was arrested by the German police. After establishing my credentials – with the identity card issued at the DP camp – they took me to Hamburg’s suburb Blankenese where I landed at the Warburg Estate, which was being turned into a small children’s home. There, I began to scribble letters to relatives in the UK and the US – only one letter accidentally reached the destination in Salt Lake City.
There, a worker at the Shell gasoline station phoned my cousin and inquired whether the name George Schwab was familiar to him. His reply: he is my wife’s cousin. My mother, too, wrote letters that reached the destination and that is how I learned that she, too, had survived and had made her way to Berlin. Thanks to the American Joint Distribution Committee, I was reunited with her in Berlin in May 1946, and together we left for New York in February 1947.
How do you think your experience influenced your life after the war?
Conflict resolution has become an overarching goal of mine. While President of the National Committee on American Foreign Policy for 22 years, the organisation that became involved in the Peace Process in Northern Ireland, we played a material role in that endeavour. I became friendly with, among others, Gerry Adams, Martin McGuinness, John Hume, Marjorie Mowlam, David Ervine and Ian Paisley [the key political figures in Northern Ireland at that time]. I can tell a similar story of bringing about the lessening of tensions between China and Taiwan, and beyond.
How do you think your families’ story should be used in the future?
The history of the Holocaust must be taught in schools, documentaries of survivors widely shown, and interviews with survivors aired on the radio and other media. Because Latvia is an understudied country from the perspective of the Holocaust, it is a field wide open for research.