A collection of films about the Holocaust in Latvia.
Rumbula’s Echo: A Documentary Film Series (in progress)
Rumbula’s Echo, a series of three documentary films, is the first movie focused on one of the largest two-day mass murders of the Holocaust. This is the meticulously organized and savage shootings of 25,000 people on two days in late 1941, in the woods near the Rumbula train stop in Eastern Europe. The series also relates other mass shootings and Holocaust atrocities that contributed to the murder of 98% of Jews trapped in the country, including the massacre of thousands at Skede near Liepaja.
Baltic Truth (2022)
Hosted by award-winning Israeli performer Dudu Fisher (Les Misérables), Baltic Truth exposes the tragic events of the first months of WW2 in the Baltic States and how almost the entire Jewish community of the occupied Baltic Nations was eliminated by face-to-face executions, one bullet at a time, with the assistance of the local population. The film does not allow the shifting of blame simply onto Nazis and shows how neighbor turned on neighbor without hesitation, prompting a massacre of great proportions. Baltic Truth also exposes how some perpetrators of Holocaust crimes are being celebrated by their fellow countrymen as national heroes to this very day.
The Mover (2019)
The true story of “Latvia’s Schindler,” The Mover offers a gripping account of Zanis Lipke, a blue-collar Luftwaffe worker in Soviet- and German-occupied Latvia. Lipke risked everything to save local Jews from Nazi persecution and death by secretly moving them from the Riga ghetto to an underground bunker on his property. From the moment the film begins, director Davis Simanis creates an ominous and suspenseful atmosphere in which the viewer, like Lipke himself, is a reluctant eyewitness to unfolding horrors. Lipke is credited with saving about a quarter of the Jews in Latvia and is honored as one of the “Righteous Among the Nations” for his heroic deeds.
If you have additional films to recommend, please email jewishsurvivorsoflatvia@gmail.com.