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ARNOLD'S WAR: 18 FEBRUARY 2018

EPISODE 9

Identifying the enemy … and much closer attention from the Nazis

It is probably difficult for people in the West to fully understand why the inhabitants of Latvia and the other Baltic countries didn’t show the same aggressive underground resistance to the Germans as did the French, Dutch and Belgian people. The fact is that they had only the one enemy — the Germans — while we had the Germans and the Russians, and generally regarded the latter as being far worse than the former.

Twelve months of Stalin’s terror had made the Soviets our enemy number one, despite their new-found allegiances with Churchill and Roosevelt. Our friends in the West — England and France —were in no position to help us, and indeed it was probably more in their interests to condemn us. After what we had experienced from the Bolsheviks, we had no choice but to remain passively neutral to the Germans, and hope for an English and French victory in the West, and for the demise of Stalin in the East.

After the US entered the war we had no doubts about an Allied victory. We also believed that the great injustices suffered by the small independent nations would be righted after the war.

With the hindsight of what happened to Czechoslovakia, Hungary and other small nations — and especially to Poland, whose invasion, after all, was the catalyst for World War Two — I have no doubt that even if we had wholeheartedly supported Stalin and helped the Soviet war effort, we would not have been better off.

In fact, the opposite might have been the case. At least after the war there were several thousands of eyewitnesses in the West to remind the Free World of the danger of Bolshevism and of the cruelties performed by Stalinist and his supporters ... and to unmask the terrible events going on in the “Workers Paradise”.

In Riga, our workshop management helped ease the burden of long working hours for myself and other students us as much as they could. Without the knowledge and approval of the German overseers, they let us out after eight hours work each day, while the other employees had to work the standard 12 hours.

This comparatively comfortable arrangement ended suddenly in the autumn of 1943. Until then our workshop had been under almost complete Latvian control. There were only two Nazi overseers, who were mainly concerned with the issue and use of raw materials, fuel and oil. From then on, though, the number of Nazis doubled and they took a much more direct interest in the day-to-day running of the shop.

Things were not going too well for the Germans on the Eastern Front. Their armies were bogged down at Leningrad, Moscow and Stalingrad, and they urgently needed maintenance facilities for their large road haulers — the Bussing-NAGs. For this purpose they built three huge igloo-style workshops alongside Riga’s existing railway workshops. These new workshops were equipped with the latest modern machines taken from French and Belgian factories, and they needed tradesmen to operate and maintain the equipment.

One of the three workshops was manned by Jewish tradesmen, some of Latvian origin but mostly recruited from Austria and Poland. The second was manned by Latvian tradesmen and included a machine shop which served all three buildings. The third was manned by German tradesmen.

All three workshops were under the direct control of uniformed Nazi Party members. A few had some technical knowledge but mostly they occupied cushy, secure positions because of their political background. They acted more like prison guards than works supervisors, with even the slightest slackening of activity receiving an immediate rebuke.

Any casual interaction between the three nationalities was strongly forbidden. There was obviously a great incentive for the Jews to work hard. Non-performers were threatened with removal to the dreaded extermination camps. For the Latvians, showing any friendliness towards the Jews meant reclassification and placement in the Jewish ghetto. On the positive side for the Latvian workers was exemption from conscription into the German Army.

The Germans had succeeded in recruiting enough motor mechanics from small, privately run workshops in Riga. They didn’t have to convince anybody to come over. They simply issued a request — actually more a demand — and the workshop owner had to release the nominated tradesmen.

But trained machine operators were harder to find in the small workshops, and the Germans’ needs had to be satisfied from larger establishments such as the one I worked in. They demanded that two operators from our machine shop be transferred to them. As the very youngest of our tradesmen, I was naturally on the list. The other was my mate Alexander Tutins. We were both unhappy about it but we had no recourse.

My new workplace was really nothing more than a large tin shed with concrete floor and no heating. The toilets were some distance from the workshops — simple, corrugated-iron sheds with open windows to disperse smells. We had no washrooms, no dressing rooms, though off course the German section was provided with a separate amenities block.

For me, the worst aspect was the longer working time. I had to start at 6am to be able to finish at 6pm and then travel directly to college. Even so, I usually missed the first 15-20 minutes of lectures. I began to ask myself if it was worth the trouble to go to school. I had doubts as to whether I could manage this schedule for any length of time. When do you study? When do you prepare assignments?

But there was one major benefit for me working directly in this German-controlled workshop. While more and more workplaces were removed from the exemption list, for the time being at least I was safe from conscription. My previous workplace had been taken off the list and some of my former workmates had already been called up.

We were allowed to go home at night, but otherwise we worked in conditions similar to a prison camp. Each morning we entered a barbed-wire enclosure surrounded by watchtowers, and were subject to a full body search. It was the same when we left in the evening.

It was strictly forbidden to talk to or otherwise associate with the Jewish workers. If we had any legitimate reason to do so, we first had to obtain permission from our Nazi overseers, who then observed the whole interaction. Within the workshop compound, there were two other barbed-wire enclosures — the ghettos for Jewish male and female workers.

Jewish males and females were forbidden to associate among themselves — even wives and husbands, or for that matter their sons and daughters. Pregnancy meant an immediate death sentence.

Most of the Jewish women had no trade and the work they were doing was really of little importance. For instance, whenever I was working on a lathe or a milling machine, there was a young Jewish woman assigned to keep the machine clean.

It wasn’t so much the machine itself that the Nazis were concerned about, but the cut-offs or swarf the machines were producing when new parts were made. When I had to change from making something from, say, cast iron or steel to bronze, brass or aluminium, the machine and all the surrounding area had to be swept and cleaned and all the cut-off metal collected in special containers. Heaven forbid if different metals had been mixed together. My “Girl Friday’s” job was to see that the precious materials that came as swarf or off-cuts from the machines were carefully collected and stored.

I was forbidden to speak to this 16-year-old from Vienna and my German wasn’t yet all that good anyway, but she managed to tell me her life story and describe life in the ghetto. She had an older sister and her mother with her. Her father had been murdered in front of her in Austria. She told me that the Ghetto commandant, a German Army — or maybe SS — captain regularly visited the ghetto after working hours, selected those unable to go to work, and liquidated them on the spot. I had no reason not to believe her.

My aunt gave me two lots of sandwiches each day to see me through work and school. Whenever I could, I would leave some of them on the tray under the lathe for my helper to pick up.

NEXT: EPISODE 10 — A dangerous time … and perhaps a last chance to see parents, other relatives and friends

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