Tag #148368 - Interview #95620 (Mera Shulman)

We returned to our native Riga in October 1945. We found city to change little. The synagogue was burned down. The same happened with the department store, where my father’s furniture shop was situated. Population of Riga changed terribly: none of the Jews survived. All our relatives were lost. We know nothing about their death or about their burial places. We managed to learn (absolutely by accident) terrible truth about death of my aunt Rosa. Rosa Lifshits, nee Kravets was the elder sister of my mother. She was a doctor and worked in a small village in Latvia. All her life she lived among peasants, helped them to give birth, treated them medically, and shared all life severities with them. In 1949 after my son’s birth I got ill with mastitis. A doctor from our polyclinic visited me and I recognized him to be a collaborator of my aunt Rosa Lifshits. He told me that at that time he ran away from Germans using a bicycle. He came to pick up Rosa and offered her to rescue together with him. She said that it was not necessary, because all local inhabitants were her patients. She was sure that they would stand up for her. Calmed down, the doctor left alone. Later it turned out that aunt Rosa was shot by Latvians (probably by her patients) even before Germans came.