by Michael Bers Baick
On the morning of September 27, 1933, someone photographed nine Jewish children in front of a Yiddish elementary school in Riga. Two girls stood up straight and posed; the others kept playing. Why stand still for a camera when you could run around with your friends?
The photo belonged to my great-great-grandmother, Bertha Lipmanovna Tumarinson, who was the school’s founder, principal, and history teacher. When Bertha emigrated to New York, she packed dozens of pictures. Half depicted her family, the other half her students. She would have taken more; Bertha clung to her loved ones obsessively. She hoarded every photo and always offered to pay collect fees for phone calls. After air travel became common, she ordered her grandchildren to send telegrams during layovers. My Zeyde (her grandson), tells me that FaceTime would have been her favorite thing in the world.
I was born in Boston in the year 2000. Growing up, I was fortunate to know a few relatives who remembered the old country, and after they died, their memory endured through family stories. Bertha’s father was a rabbi; Bertha broke his heart by becoming an atheist. Yet as the head of the grunshul (elementary school), she forged her own congregation. She and her fellow teachers aimed to prepare their students for modernity, preserve their Yiddishkeit identity, and fight for the dignity of all downtrodden people. This curriculum mirrored the ideals of Baba Bertha’s social democratic political party, the Jewish Labor Bund.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, when I was banished from my university campus and cooped up at home, I started Zooming with my relatives to record everything they could remember. Then I started connecting with Latvian Jewish descendants around the world, including the Jewish Survivors of Latvia. They welcomed me with open arms, and we formed friendships that crossed generational and cultural barriers.
After graduating from college, I set my sights on visiting Riga. Ivar Brod, the editor of the Latvian American Jewish Courier, contacted a half-dozen Latvian Jews who agreed to help me travel to the city and show me around. With their help, the history I learned from photos, stories, and books came to life in three dimensions. I walked past soaring cathedrals, squat wooden houses, Jugdenstil Art Nouveau facades, and Soviet apartment blocks. Ilya Lensky, the director of the Jews in Latvia Museum, pointed out traces of our past at every corner: from the still-operating Splendid Palace movie theater (once a jewel of the “Jewish Broadway” neighborhood) to a synagogue-turned-apartment building where a Torah niche still visibly juts out of the wall. He also showed me a classroom where Riga’s Jewish children learn today. Mir zaynen do. We’re still here.
All of it was lovely, but nothing compared to the moment I reached the school. At first, I did not recognize it, but then I turned right and suddenly, my Baba Bertha’s photograph clicked into my own field of vision. Much was the same: the chimneys, the courtyard, and the row of brown houses stretching down Jēzusbaznīcas iela (Christchurch Street).
Involuntarily, I shouted, “Holy shit!”
My family stories leapt out of my photograph and onto the street. Closeness in space shrank the distance of time; the American historian John Demos calls this dissolving “the pastness of the past.” They were real people, people who stood exactly where I was standing.
They all lived. And they all died.
Bertha left Riga in 1939, sensing the impending war. But she had no idea just how much devastation would come. When the Germans arrived in 1941, they and their Latvian collaborators burned down the Great Choral Synagogue—just down the street from Bertha’s school—with Jews trapped inside. A film crew captured the destruction, turning it into propaganda newsreels. The Nazis tortured Jews on the street, confined them to a ghetto, and finally shot 25,000 of them, one by one, in the Rumbula Forest. Among those 25,000 were at least 50 of my family members.
Before being killed, the historian Simon Dubnow is said to have told Jews of Riga:
“Yidn, shraybt un farshraybt.” / “Jews, write and record.”
My Baba Bertha heeded Dubnow’s call, and so did many others. Thanks to their lifetimes of labor, we have all the raw material we need to remember the Holocaust and the Jewish world that existed in Europe before it came. Today, as living witnesses dwindle, our task is changing. Now, instead of accumulating stories, we must retell them—and decide where they will lead us.
After I returned from Riga, I found a second photo of the school. In this one, over a hundred more students have rushed out into the courtyard, some aiming straight for the camera.
Some are happy, others seem annoyed, one seems to buckle as he gives his friend a piggyback ride. Those children had plans. They dreamed about what they would be when they grew up. In school, they were learning to lead the Jewish people through the twentieth century.
They didn’t know that eight years later, the Nazis would march most of them into Rumbula Forest, force them to strip naked and lie facedown in a pit of corpses (they called this Sardinenpackung, “sardine-packing”), and shoot them in the back of the head. Most of the children in that photo would’ve been scattered among the crowd.
At the very bottom of the frame, a little boy gestures, “look at me!” So, look at him.
As children, they lived the least and lost the most, yet there remains much to remember about the sliver of time they had. In the Bers family Yiddish schools, they stuffed their minds with geometry, geography, Yiddish, Hebrew, English, Latin, and French. They sang in the choir and wore elaborate costumes for school plays. In the winter, they turned the courtyard into an ice rink; in summer, they swam at Jūrmula Beach. They were running, jumping, living beings, and they should have lived much longer.
Visiting Riga reminded me that we are the heirs to the urgency of their lives, not just the artifacts. My Baba Bertha was teaching these children to make the world a better place. We cannot save their unfinished lives, but we can continue their mission.
If you’re reading this, and you’re sad that one of those children didn’t grow up, I don’t want you to stop reading and let that sadness subside. I want you to do something. Look at the photo, look straight at the face of one child who never grew up, and give that chance to another child.
Set up a monthly donation to the International Rescue Committee (rescue.org). I recommend the IRC for practical reasons—they’re a proven provider of humanitarian aid—and for personal ones—they helped save Baba Bertha’s family from the Holocaust.
Set up the donation. Don’t do anything else first; don’t even read the next paragraph.
Have you done it? Good. Thank you.
My Baba Bertha gave us the gift of her photos. We can give the future something better; for there is no better way of preserving history than preserving life.
