[Congressional Record Volume 144, Number 124 (Thursday, September 17, 1998)]
[Senate]
[Pages S10532-S10533]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                       ``MEMORIES AND MIRACLES''

 Mr. MOYNIHAN. Mr. President, I rise to commend to the Senate 
the stirring tale of Jack Ratz, a New Yorker who recently published a 
remarkable book, Endless Miracles. Mr. Ratz, who resides with his wife, 
Doris, in the Brooklyn neighborhood of Mill Basin, is one of the last 
survivors of the flourishing Jewish community of Latvia, which lost all 
but 300 of its 35,000 members during the Holocaust.
  Jack Ratz's memoirs is an eloquent refutation to those who would dare 
to trivialize, distort, or even deny the Holocaust's important lessons. 
His book well reflects the affirmative message that Jack Ratz shares 
with New York City school children during his regular visits to the 
city classrooms.
  As the survivors of the Holocaust succumb to old age there are fewer 
and fewer eyewitnesses to this tragedy. Jack Ratz has provided an 
invaluable service with his moving account of the Latvian Holocaust 
experience.
  I ask to have printed in the Record a recent article in the New York 
City Jewish Week about Jack Ratz and ``Endless Miracles.''
  The article follows:

                 [From the Jewish Week, Aug. 14, 1998]

                         Memories and Miracles

                           (By Nancy Beiles)

       During a recent trip to Riga, Latvia, Jack Ratz visited a 
     museum commemorating Latvian Holocaust victims, and was drawn 
     to a series of photos of camp inmates hanging on the wall. 
     One in particular caught his attention--a black-and-white 
     photo of a 16-year-old boy, head shaven, wearing work clothes 
     decorated with the Star of David and the number 281.
       ``I asked the guard, `Who are those people?' He said, `they 
     died a long time ago,' recalled Ratz, of Mill Basin, a 
     Latvian-born Holocaust survivor. ``I told him I know three of 
     those people. Two were father and son and yes, they were 
     killed. But the photo of the young fellow on the right--he is 
     talking to you. He is me.''
       Ratz had come to Riga to say Kaddish for members of his 
     family killed in the Rumboli Forest in 1941, and to visit the 
     old ghetto where he and his father lived before being sent 
     off to a series of work and concentration camps.
       ``All of a sudden I saw a picture of myself hanging on the 
     wall and a flash of memories came rushing back to me of 55 
     years ago,'' Ratz recalls, tearfully. ``I could only cry. I 
     found myself hanging on the wall with all the dead people.
       Of the 35,000 Jews who lived in Latvia at the time of 
     German occupation in 1941, Ratz is one of just 300 who 
     survived. Because of the scarcity of Latvian survivors, their 
     particular experience during the Holocaust is rarely 
     recounted. ``Very few Latvian Jews escaped because the 
     general population was not sympathetic to aiding the Jews,'' 
     says William Schulman, director of the Holocaust Resource 
     Center at Queensborough Community College. `The Germans made 
     use of the Latvians to guard the Jews and persecute them, to 
     send them to their death. So there are very few memoirs of 
     survivors.''
       Ratz, who is retired from the television repair business, 
     and his American-born wife, Doris, are and trying to fill 
     that gap in Holocaust memory.
       The four years he and his father spent in labor and 
     concentration camps and their subsequent liberation forms the 
     basis for `Ratz's newly-published memoir, ``Endless 
     Miracles'' (1998; Shengold Publishers Inc.). Ratz's account 
     caught the attention of Moshe Sheinhaum, president of 
     Shengold Publishers, precisely because it explores 
     episodes of the Holocaust that are not often talked about. 
     ``I've published over 70 books on the Holocaust and this 
     is one of the most exciting,'' says Sheinbaum. ``Very 
     little has been done about Riga.''
       Starting with historical background about the Jewish 
     community in Latvia, the book's emotional beginning describes 
     the first Nazi programs in Riga that would eventually spiral 
     into genocide. Shortly after the Germans arrived in Latvia in 
     1941, displacing the Russians, who had occupied Latvia just a 
     year earlier, they created two Jewish ghettos. One was for 
     able-bodied men, the other for women, children and the 
     disabled. Just 14 at the time, Ratz could have stayed with 
     his mother and younger siblings, but he decided to ``take a 
     chance,'' he says, and go with his father.
       This is the first of the ``endless miracles'' Ratz 
     describes--fortuitous decisions that saved his life. After he 
     and his father went to the Jewish workers' ghetto, over the 
     course of a few weeks the Nazis executed all the women, 
     children, elderly and disabled men from the other ghetto--
     including Ratz's mother and siblings--in grisly mass 
     executions in the Rumboli Forest.
       With no chance to grieve, Ratz writes, ``Even our mourning 
     was cut short. We were forced to return to work immediately 
     under penalty of instant death.'' The subsequent years are an 
     accumulation of sorrows and terror.
       Ratz and his father were first sent to Lenta, a work camp 
     near Riga, then to Salaspils, a death camp, back to Lenta and 
     from there to Stuthoff, another death camp,

[[Page S10533]]

     and Burgraben. During these four years, Ratz and his father 
     managed to stay alive by luck--for example, being in the 
     second half of a line from which the Nazis take the first 
     half to kill, and by what Ratz says can only be attributed to 
     God's grace.
       Unlike many survivors, who lost not only their loved ones 
     but also their faith somewhere in the camps, Ratz's faith 
     stayed intact. It was his belief in God that allowed him to 
     weather those years and survive. ``If I would not believe in 
     God, I would not be alive today,'' he says. ``By believing 
     it, I felt I survived. God actually picked up his hand and 
     showed me the way.''
       One time, that way meant masquerading as a skilled 
     craftsman with his father so they could be eligible for a 
     work slot in a factory near Stuthoff outside of the firing 
     range. On another occasion, it meant stealing cigarettes from 
     guards to trade for food from more recent arrivals who were 
     not yet starved. The loaf of bread that was bartered for two 
     cigarettes helped Ratz and his father ward off hunger a 
     little longer.
       Ratz links his experience during those years to that of 
     Jews throughout history, dating back to biblical times--Jews 
     who were persecuted and whose faith was tested. Ratz, whose 
     Hebrew name is Isaac, says that when his father first went 
     with him to the ghetto in Riga, his father identified with 
     Abraham, sensing that he too was being called upon to 
     sacrifice his son, his Isaac.
       For his part, Ratz appears in the book as a latter-day 
     Joseph. Like the biblical figure who gave food from the 
     Egyptian storehouses to his hungry brothers during a famine, 
     Ratz, himself weak and hungry, whenever possible retrieved 
     food to give to people in the camps who were hovering ever 
     closer to starvation. On one occasion, he managed to salvage 
     scraps of food from refuse bins in a camp kitchen where he 
     worked; another time, Ratz accidentally discovered a dead 
     horse from which he was able to give to people what was a 
     rare commodity in the camps: meat. ``God also showed me how 
     to help people instead of how Hitler destroyed people,'' Ratz 
     explains.
       In Ratz's book, the brutality of the camps springs to life 
     most poignantly in small details that are often overlooked by 
     historians. He tells of sand irritating his throat because 
     the Nazis would use potatoes still caked with soil for the 
     inmates' soup and of relishing the straw matting on the bunks 
     in one camp because he had just come from a camp where he and 
     three others slept on a single wooden board. And he describes 
     his father sewing his few valuables into his hernia belt so 
     that he would have something to trade for food when all else 
     failed.
       In 1945, when the Russians finally liberated Ratz and his 
     father, the freedom was initially hollow. ``You have to be 
     lucky how you're liberated also,'' Ratz says. ``To be 
     liberated by Russians was not freedom.''
       Unlike the survivors liberated by Americans or British who 
     were immediately assigned to ``displaced persons'' camps and 
     given medical treatment, those freed by the Russians were 
     left to fend for themselves. ``We were all free, but we did 
     not know what to do or where to go,'' Ratz writes.
       The Russian zone is described by Ratz as chaotic. When it 
     became clear the Russians were not making any arrangements to 
     treat the sick, some newly-free Jews stole to bring those in 
     need of medical care to a hospital. Those Germans from the 
     camps who eluded imprisonment tried to disguise themselves as 
     Jews so that the Russians would not capture them. Ratz 
     chillingly recounts seeing guards from the camp, now wearing 
     prisoners' uniforms, hiding in a crowd. Speaking to the 
     Soviet soldiers in Russian, he pointed them out and watched 
     as the soldiers shot them on the spot.

                          ____________________