"We arrived in Riga ... You could hardly move because of the cold," remembered Susan Taube about her deportation to the Riga ghetto. "They pushed us in apartments and no light, no heat, nothing

"We arrived in Riga ... You could hardly move because of the cold," remembered Susan Taube about her deportation to the Riga ghetto. "They pushed us in apartments and no light, no heat, nothing."

In mid-October 1941, Nazi authorities began deportations of Jews from the German Reich to ghettos in occupied eastern Europe. In late November, the first trains from Berlin arrived in Riga. Many never arrived in the ghetto—instead they were taken to the nearby Rumbula Forest and shot.

In January 1942, Susan—along with her mother, grandmother, and sister—was forced onto a train car in Berlin that would take her to Riga. Shortly after arriving, Susan's grandmother, Jettchen, was taken away, never to be seen again.

Susan recalled that the Nazis took away children, the sick, and the elderly. "People they figured could work, they kept them alive for a while."

Jettchen was murdered in the forest outside Riga.

Susan, her sister, and her mother would spend nearly 20 months in the Riga ghetto before being sent to the Kaiserwald concentration camp near Riga. Susan would survive two more concentration camps and a death march before she was liberated in March 1945. Her sister and mother did not survive.

Susan is pictured here on the right with a friend in Berlin in 1940.

Photo: USHMM, courtesy of Susan and Herman Taube less

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