Article by Ivar Brod, translated by Aviva Solovey
The Latvian Jewish Courier Vol. 39, Issue 1 – August 2025
In the fall of 2010, we began to compile articles about outstanding Jews from Latvia to be included in the Latvian Jewish Encyclopedia, planned for publishing by the Shamir Society in Riga. The following is an article prepared for the aforementioned volume.
Schneider, Gertrude (May 27, 1928, Vienna – September 7, 2020, New York) was a scientist-historian, a writer, and a Holocaust survivor. She was a former prisoner of the Riga ghetto and several concentration camps, the founder of JSL, the first editor of The Latvian Jewish Courier, and a university professor. She was also the associate placement director (1985 – 1995) and president of the PhD Alumni Association (1983 – 2009) at the City University of New York Graduate School. She was not actually born in Latvia, but was brought from Austria in January 1942 directly to the Riga ghetto. Nevertheless, her dissertation and her scientific works, dedicated to the Riga ghetto and Latvian Jews, made her one of the most famous Jews in Latvia.
Gertrude Schneider was born in Vienna, Ottakring to her parents, Pinkas and Charlotte Hirschhorn. In 1938, after the “Anschluss” of Austria to the German Reich, she was expelled from school for being Jewish. Gertrude, her parents, and her younger sister, Rita, were all deported to Nazi-occupied Latvia in February of 1942. There, in the Riga ghetto, 14-year-old Gertrude kept a diary in which she secretly documented the brutality they faced, which later became the framework for a book she wrote on the Riga ghetto. In 1943, the family was deported to the Kaiserwald concentration camp and, in 1944, to the concentration camp in Stutthof. Following a period of slave labor and surviving a death march, Gertrude, along with her mother and sister, were liberated in March of 1945, but her father had died in the Buchenwald concentration camp.
Immediately after the war, Gertrude traveled around Eastern Europe, Israel, and the United States to collect the memories and writings of other survivors. She also collected documentary evidence on the lives of inmates, guards, and others who participated in, were victims of, or witnessed the Latvian Holocaust. Gertrude, her mother, and sister, immigrated to the United States in 1947. There, she intensively studied mathematics and history in school and later in college. In 1973, she received her doctorate from the Graduate School of the City University of New York (CUNY). The subject of her thesis was “The Riga Ghetto, 1941–1944”. She met her future husband, Eric, in New York and they got married in July of 1951. Eventually, they had a daughter and two sons.
In her academic work, Dr. Schneider combined historical descriptions of the Holocaust with personal memories and of other survivors. She published articles and several books devoted to the Holocaust in Latvia, such as Journey into Terror: The Story of the Riga Ghetto; Muted Voices: Jewish Survivors of Latvia Remember; The Unfinished Road: Jewish Survivors of Latvia Look Back; Reise in den Tod: Deutsche Juden in Riga 1941-1944, and others. Her articles were published in The Jewish Frontier, Jewish Social Studies, The Jewish Press, and The Daily Forward. Dr. Schneider lectured on the Holocaust at the University of Toronto, Oldenburg University, the City University of New York Graduate School, and many others.
Several of Gertrude Schneider’s published works.
