Last night before I went to sleep, I lit a Yahrzeit candle.

Lighting the candle was not an act of faith, but one of symbolic connection to my past. In chronicling and recalling the sad events of the August 23-25, 1941, I resolve never to forget the memory of those members of my family that were murdered on those dates.

In that 72 hour period, in the tiny village of Ribinishki where my grandfather was born, a horrific, mass execution took place. A group of Latvian Fascist Police, the "Aizargi" or "Civil Defense" (with the complicity of Nazi soldiers) seized, confined and then shot each inhabitant. Killed were 381 Jews, including all the remaining members of my grandfather's large extended family. Their bodies were tossed into a mass grave. The grave was later dug up and the bodies burned in an attempt to erase any evidence of the crime.

The story started in June when the Nazi invasion of the Baltics brought Latvia under its control. Having been ruled for centuries by foreign powers, most notably the Czars, Latvians had achieved independence briefly after WWI. Latvian nationalists were not particularly fond of the country's nearly 100,000 Jews since they were regarded as mostly as pro-Soviet and therefore an unpatriotic, fifth column. At that moment in history, Latvian nationalists very concerned with driving out Soviet influence and some collaborated the Nazis for that reason. In 1940 the Soviets occupied and controlled Latvia, but by 1941 they had been driven out by the Nazis. A killing spree ensued. Those who did not escape and who were seen by an increasingly fascist Latvian forces as Soviet-sympathizers were often rounded up and summarily killed. The Jewish population of Latvia, the majority of which lived in the relatively modern capital of Riga, was decimated---95% were killed---by the fall of 1941.

The Soloway family was not part of the hustle and bustle of Riga. My great-great-grandparents, Baruch Tewel Soloway (1823-1896), son of Simen Soloway, and his wife Sheina Soloway (b. 1831), daughter of Nison Gutkin, lived in the small town of Rezekne in eastern Latvia, near the Russian border. A few Jews from Rezekne and the surrounding area formed a small village called Ribinishki. At first it was just a few families, peaking at 400 inhabitants before WWII. My great-grandfather, [Chaim] Zussman Soloway, a peddler and shoemaker, was born in 1855. He married my great-grandmother [Chaya] Sara Orlean, and living in poverty in Ribinishki, they had 13 children between 1880 and 1904. (That's them to the left in a photograph dated 1910 taken in Ribinishki by a traveling photographer named Taubkin.) They eked out an existence on a tiny plot of land they rented and lived in a wooden house with a straw roof and dirt floor.

The Orlean clan was dominant in the village. They too had been among the first to settle Ribinishki in 1790. The descendants of Abram Orlean (b~1800) accounted for many large families, and my great-grandmother was not the only Orlean to marry a Soloway.

Then there was another family, the Chodaks, from nearby town. My other great-grandfather, Solomon Chodak (later Kodack) married the oldest daughter of Zussman and Sara Soloway. She was later known as Annie. Sol and Annie had moved to Toronto by 1907. Back in Ribinishki, a much-younger sister of Solomon Chodak named Beile(pictured at top, right), married Sara Orlean Soloway's brother, Reuben. The Chodak, Orlean and Soloway families intermingled more and more. By the end of the 19th century, the family tree's largest branches had grown into place. Tragically, in 1941, those who had not been fortunate enough to get out, were all killed.

On the day that the blood-thirsty killers came for my family they had already been busy, roaming neighboring villages. It is hard to imagine what it must have been like in those summer months. There was no escaping to the east anymore, and to the west there was only the Nazis and assured death. In fact, for millions Jews trapped in eastern Europe death was all around. On August 23, the men of the dreaded Aizargi came to Ribinishki and rounded up all the Jews, forcing them into a synagogue where they were kept under guard for up to two days. During this time the Aizargi and other Nazi-sympathizers combed the village and surrounding area and caught any Jews left in hiding. The most vulnerable, the elderly and the young, had been unable to escape earlier, but in many cases entire families were still intact. They would spend their last hours together, held like animals waiting for slaughter.

On August 24 and 25, they were loaded onto a truck and taken to the nearby woods . With their backs facing their executioners, they were shot at point blank range and killed one, by one. Among those killed were my grandfather's older brother, Avrum, age 50, (pictured above, right) and his wife, Blume and their three young children, Sara, 10, Malka, 8, and Zussman, 5. (The little boy pictured above is Zussman.) At least one of my grandfather's sisters was also killed (we believe this sister is the woman in the photograph to the right). Beile Chodack Orlean, my grandfather's 80-year old aunt, was killed that day along with some of her adult children and young grandchildren.

Over sixty members of the Zlatokrilov and Zangvill families, cousins of my grandfather were also killed. One of my grandfather's sisters, Krayne, married a Zangvill. One of their sons was the only member of the family to cheat death. He ended up in a series of work and concentration camps nearly meeting his end on a number of occasions including by disease in Displaced Persons camps after the war. He is in his eighties and lives in Israel with his wife, children and grandchildren.

In the next installment of this posting find out how the man who led the extermination of the Jews of Ribinishki wound up spending the rest of his life free of prosecution in Canada, just a stone's throw from the house where I lived for the first twenty years of my life.

PART TWO HERE.


*Yahrzeit or Yohr Tzeit, means "Time of Year" in Yiddish. Derived from the German word, Jahrezeit, it also refers to the annual anniversary of the day of death of a relative.