The Rescuer and the Rescued: A Latvian Story of the Holocaust

Riva Zivcon and her daughter Adinka 

(photo courtesy of Ada Zivcon Israeli)

The collections in the Hoover Institution Archives provide a record of history both large and small.  It is often the exceptional stories of individuals that make larger events come to life. Such human interest stories become doubly intriguing when both the tale and the researching tracking it are remarkable, as exemplified by a research project currently under way in the archives.

Edward Anders, a retired astrophysicist living in Burlingame, California, is sponsoring research into a story that is informed by his own life and the circumstances under which he survived the Holocaust in his native Latvia.

As a Jewish teenager living in the port city of Liepāja, Anders and his family were in extreme peril when the Nazis invaded Soviet-occupied Latvia in 1941. Other members of Anders’s family perished in the Holocaust, but he and his mother survived.  This was initially due to the young Anders falsely claiming to the new authorities that his mother was really a German foundling raised by a Latvian Jewish couple. Two Latvian women vouched for this claim, at great risk to themselves.

After World War II, and time spent as a refugee in Germany, Anders came to the United States, where he became a noted scientist specializing in the study of meteorites. Since retiring from the University of Chicago, he has been active as an historian, with an emphasis on documenting the fate of Latvian Jews during the war. As part of this effort, he created a searchable database of about 7000 Jewish persons alive in Liepāja in June 1941, with information describing what happened to them subsequently. In October 2000, he took part in the first conference in post-Soviet Latvia on the Holocaust, and he has made important contributions to the work of the Museum of the Occupation of Latvia, located in Rīga.

In addition to publishing two volumes of memoirs (a full autobiography From Darkness to Light in 2008 and a condensed 2010 version Amidst Latvians during the Holocaust), Anders arranged for the translation and publication of the diary of another Latvian Holocaust survivor, Kalman Linkimer. In his diary, Linkimer not only wrote about his own experiences in wartime Latvia but also transcribed the accounts of other Latvian Jews hiding from the Nazis. In one of these transcriptions, Riva Zivcon describes how a Latvian policeman, a certain Corporal Avots, helped her and her 3-year-old daughter Adinka escape from the Rīga ghetto.  Accompanied by Riva Zivcon and carrying Adinka on his arm, the policeman walked out one of the ghetto gates, brazenly telling the guards he encountered that the mother and daughter were his own wife and child.

Former site of one of the Rīga ghetto gates. 

Holokausta izpētes problēmas Latvijā collection, Box 1, Hoover Institution Archives

Avots then took the Zivcons to the home of his girlfriend, telling her that the two were Russians. But when the girlfriend discovered that Adinka spoke only Yiddish, she became fearful of hiding the Zivcons in her place. Avots then took the Zivcons to the home of a prewar acquaintance, a violinist with whom the pair stayed for several weeks before returning to Liepāja, where separate hiding places were found for mother and daughter. Both Zivcons survived the war.

Adinka Zivcon (photo courtesy of Ada Zivcon Israeli)

Ada Zivcon is now a grandmother living in Israel. Both she and Professor Anders want the various Latvians who saved the Zivcons to be officially recognized as “righteous gentiles” by Yad Vashem, the Holocaust memorial and museum in Jerusalem. So far, Ada Zivcon has succeeded in obtaining this honor for Otilija Šimelpfenigs, who hid her as a child for 16 months. In addition, Professor Anders succeeded in identifying the Latvian violinist as Kārlis Vestens (1899–1978) and in having Vestens recognized for his bravery.

However, in the case of Corporal Avots, the question of having recognition bestowed was complicated by the fact that Riva Zivcon did not learn the first name of the policeman who rescued her and her baby, and in the Linkimer diary he is referred to only by his surname. The ghetto guard of which Avots was part consisted of members of the 20th Latvian police battalion and selected members of the Rīga municipal police. No central roster of the ghetto guard has ever been discovered, but the most promising source for information on these police units are records contained in the Latviešu Centrālā Komiteja collection in the Hoover Institution Archives.

So far, Meldra Atteka and Una Veilande (Latvian researchers who have volunteered to work for Professor Anders) have found references in this collection to more than one Corporal Avots. Their latest find, which refers to a Corporal Fricis Avots, seems to be the most promising lead, and Professor Anders is optimistic that a solution is at hand to the nearly 75-year-old mystery of the exact identity of the Riga policeman who rescued the Zivcons. The researchers still have about 10 manuscript boxes of documents to go through, and they will continue to look for more documentation relating to the puzzle. Copies of the documents, should they turn out to be ones identifying the right Corporal Avots, will then be submitted to Yad Vashem. If Yad Vashem decides to recognize Avots as a rescuer of Jews, the Latvian government would honor him as well. A plaque at the entrance of a street where the Rīga ghetto was once located honors another “righteous gentile,” Zhan Lipke.

Plaque in Rīga honoring Zhan Lipke. 

Holokausta izpētes problēmas Latvijā collection, Box 1, Hoover Institution Archives

The Latviešu Centrālā Komiteja collection is the single largest resource on Latvian history in the Hoover Institution Archives. It is very much a composite: a large part of the collection pertains to the life of Latvians in Displaced Persons’ Camps in Germany after World War II; another significant component consists of records relating to Latvian police and military units that were created under the German occupation of Latvia during World War II. The collection also contains demographic data about Latvia under the German occupation, materials relating to nationalist resistance groups in Latvia during the same period, and issuances of the government of independent Latvia before the country’s annexation by the Soviet Union in 1940.

The complexity of the situation in Latvia during World War II, and the dual tragedies of Latvian Jews in peril from the Nazis and other Latvians at risk of imprisonment and deportation by Soviet authorities, is captured in a recent documentary film entitled Controversial History (directed by Inara Kolmane and Uldis Neiburgs, Rīga, 2010). Edward Anders figures prominently in this film as one of three individuals who recount their experiences in Latvia during World War II. In the film, Anders revisits Liepāja and the site near that town where the Nazis murdered some 2739 Jews on December 15, 1941. The documentary is in the audiovisual collection of Green Library at Stanford University.

Related archival collection:
Holokausta izpētes problēmas Latvijā  (Conference: 2000: Riga, Latvia)

You've Got V-Mail

When a colleague encountered something unfamiliar while working on a collection of documents and asked me if I knew anything about "V-Mail," I thought she must be referring to some new and exotic form of electronic mail. I was unaware that the term “vmail” was currently used by some people as shorthand for voice mail. But rather than the present, her question led to the past and a form of mail devised in exceptional circumstances—World War II—and making use of technology, albeit of a non-electronic kind.

A little digging and a helpful web page turned up a wealth of details on the subject of V-Mail. It turned out that the V stood for Victory, a word ubiquitous in the discourse of the Allied war effort, which had already seen the promotion of Victory gardens (to grow vegetables on the home front) and the sale of Victory bonds (to raise money from the public). V-Mail referred to a process whereby correspondence being sent to troops overseas was microfilmed to reduce its physical volume so as to free up space on cargo planes for war material.

The basic V-Mail program was fairly simple. One used standardized stationery on which to write letters; the letters were then microfilmed, and the microfilm was then shipped overseas, where it was developed and then delivered. But behind this lay a formidable logistic undertaking. Processing centers had to established, both in the United States and abroad, requiring significant amounts of personnel and equipment. Eastman Kodak was awarded the contract for the microfilm machines, and V-Mail detachments were created in the postal units of the armed forces. Three regional centers were established in the United States (San Francisco, New York, and Chicago) to process V-Mail, along with numerous stations overseas.

The archives has a number of promotional posters that stress V-Mail’s reliability and speed and suggest that it was the “most patriotic” way to send mail to troops. One poster details the savings that V-Mail created in terms of cargo space. Its morale-boosting importance was another theme, captured in the slogan “You write, he’ll fight.” Of course, like other mail sent during wartime, V-Mail was subject to censorship.

The V-Mail program lasted from June 1942 until November 1945, but the mail itself has survived and thus remains available. The same may not hold true for e-mail, at least in its electronic form. As technology and formats change, files may not always remain recoverable, a challenge with which archivists are beginning to grapple.

A fuller description of the specifics of the V-Mail program can be found at the National Postal Museum section of the Smithsonian Institution’s web page.

Political Poster Collection, US 7299, Hoover Institution Archives

Political Poster Collection, US 7298, Hoover Institution Archives

Political Poster Collection, US 7297, Hoover Institution Archives

The Good Librarian

Because of the collecting scope of the library and archives, the original impetus for which came from Herbert Hoover's determination to document World War I in hopes that future conflicts could be prevented, many of its materials relate to
episodes of collective violence: the mass deportations and executions under Stalin; the Holocaust; and various wars, large and small. One can't help being struck by the extent of the inhumanity that is recorded in such documents, bringing to mind a line spoken by one of the characters in James Joyce's Ulysses: “History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.”

Fortunately, one also encounters examples of individuals and groups who worked to alleviate suffering or help the victims of catastrophes. In preparing materials to show the ambassador of Lithuania on his visit to the archives, I had a chance to look again at a small collection pertaining to a woman who, at great risk to herself, rescued Jews in German-occupied Vilnius during World War II. That the woman, Ona Šimaitė, was also a university librarian made her story even more compelling; she was concerned with preserving not only the printed word but human life.

Using the cover of her profession to visit Jews in the Vilnius ghetto, Šimaitė brought them books and also food, medicine, and clothes. She was able to rescue a number of Jewish children, bringing them out of the ghetto hidden in potato sacks. She also acted as a courier for the underground resistance to the Nazis. Šimaitė paid a high price for her actions: arrested by the Gestapo, she was tortured and eventually sent to the Dachau concentration camp but somehow survived.

After the war, Šimaitė settled in France, where she continued to work as a librarian. Having adopted one of the Jewish children she had saved in Vilnius, she and her daughter eventually moved to Israel. Šimaitė was presented with a medal by the State of Israel in recognition of her rescue efforts. She died in France in 1970.

The Ona Šimaitė papers in the archives contain a small album of photos and clippings, as well as notes she made during the German occupation of Lithuania. It also contains correspondence, including letters written to her by Vytautas Landsbergis in 1968. A musicology student at the time, Landsbergis would later become famous as the leader of the independence movement in Lithuania, serving as the country's first president in the wake of the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991.

Although Šimaitė’s story was little known outside of Lithuania, a recently scholarly article on her, written by Julija Sukys, can be found in the summer 2008 ( 54, no. 2) issue of the journal, Lituanus.

Ona Šimaitė with Antanas Liutkus, 1969, Ona Šimaitė papers, Hoover Institution Archives.

Present at the Creation

In a long and distinguished career as a French diplomat, Jacques Leprette occupied a number of important posts, most notably as his country's ambassador to the United Nations (1976–82) and to the European Community (1982–85). His papers in the archives document important aspects of French foreign policy in this period; they also record Leprette's intimate knowledge of American society, a product of his lengthy stay in the United States as a junior official with the French embassy in Washington.

Among the materials in the collection, however, it was a document from the earliest part of his career that seemed to have been singled out by Leprette as an item of special significance: an original draft of the treaty establishing the Council of Europe, signed in London in May 1949. Leprette was part of the French delegation at the London conference that negotiated the treaty and subsequently served as a counselor at the Council of Europe in Strasbourg.

The draft in the Leprette papers has handwritten corrections to the French version of the treaty, as well the signatures of the various heads of delegations present at the council’s creation, including Ernest Bevin from the United Kingdom and Robert Schuman, from France. Given the document’s intrinsic value as an artifact and the subsequent importance of the Council of Europe in the story of European integration, it was decided to give it special treatment so that it could be both preserved and shown to visitors to the archives. Among the staff of the archives, such presentation items are known informally as “treasures”; it was nice to be able to add something to this select category.

The archives’ Preservation Department designed and made a portfolio to house the treaty draft. The portfolio encapsulated the draft and a photo depicting the treaty’s signing. The resulting whole allows the items to be easily presented and also protects them from any possible harm.

The Leprette papers contain other documents relating to the Council of Europe, including transcripts of proceedings held during the first years of the council’s existence. The Council of Europe went on to establish the European Court
of Human Rights and continues to play an important role in promoting cooperation among its member states in the areas of common legal standards and democratic governance.


Photograph depicting the signing ceremony for the founding treaty of the Council of Europe, London, May 5, 1949, Jacques Leprette Papers, Hoover Institution Archives


Last page of draft of Council of Europe treaty, with the signature of Ernest Bevin, the British representative, Jacques Leprette Papers, Hoover Institution Archives


Cover of special presentation folder for Council of Europe treaty, Jacques Leprette Papers, Hoover Institution Archives


Expanded view of presentation folder, showing encapsulated photograph and treaty, Jacques Leprette Papers, Hoover Institution Archives

Culture Shock

In organizing and describing materials in archives such as ours, with collections from all over the globe, the exotic can sometimes seem routine. One gets used to working with documents in any number of languages and photographs that depict unusual scenes in distant places. Sometimes, however, one experiences what might be called the shock of the familiar: something one recognizes but in a radically different context.

I had such a sensation recently while working on the Wayne Holder papers, which largely deal with Estonia, especially during the period when Estonians were struggling for renewed independence (from the late 1980s until it was achieved
in 1991). Knowing the history of the Baltic states, I found the photographs of the Estonian independence movement in the Holder collection extremely interesting but not startling. I already had a frame of reference with which to interpret them; they resembled other photographs depicting similar events occurring in Latvia and Lithuania at the same time, as all three Baltic countries sought to escape the Soviet Union and to become sovereign nations again.

What did astonish me were the photographs below of young people in Tallinn, Estonia, in the late 1980s. Members of a subculture defining itself through punk music, they looked as though they had stepped off the streets of London or San
Francisco in the late 1970s. But the unusual clothes and hairstyles were a good deal more than a fashion statement; even in the late Soviet period, those who dressed this way in Estonia were taking rather more risks than their Western counterparts. In the 1960s, hippies in the Soviet Union and elsewhere in Eastern Europe had been subject to persecution by the state, and one can imagine that punks would have also encountered hostility from the authorities.

The role of Western countercultural trends in undermining the orthodoxy of Soviet society was significant. I have talked to people in Latvia who spoke rapturously of the first time they heard the music of the Beatles and Bob Dylan and how such music had played a role in the emergence of a youth culture in Eastern Europe seeking to be free of the party line imposed by the communist state. I wondered if the punk movement, admittedly a much smaller phenomenon than the ’60s counterculture, had played a part in the changing attitudes in Estonia in the 1980s.

In the album where I discovered these photographs, the young woman with the cap is identified as Merle (“Merca”) Jääger, about whom there were other materials in the Holder papers. In the 1980s, as a poet associated with the punk scene in Estonia, she had been invited to perform her poetry before Estonian émigré audiences in Toronto and New York. Wayne Holder had published some of her poems in English in a short-lived literary journal (Cake) in San Francisco in 1988. Additional material established a connection between the Estonian punk movement and protests against the Soviet system, themes present in Jääger’s poetry.

Jääger was one of a number of Estonian literary figures that Holder met and corresponded with in Estonia. Many were far more conventional than she was, but all were in some way involved in the cultural and political awakening in Estonia in
the 1980s. My experience with the photographs has given me a greater appreciation for Holder himself and for the extent of his contacts in a place he visited as an outsider during a time of great change.

Wayne Holder papers, Box 8, Hoover Institution Archives.
This work is protected by privacy and copyright laws and is provided for educational and research purposes only. Any infringing use may be subject to disciplinary action and/or civil or criminal liability as provided by law. If you object to Hoover's use of this image, please contact archives@hoover.stanford.edu.

Wayne Holder papers, Box 8, Hoover Institution Archives.
This work is protected by privacy and copyright laws and is provided for educational and research purposes only. Any infringing use may be subject to disciplinary action and/or civil or criminal liability as provided by law. If you object to Hoover's use of this image, please contact archives@hoover.stanford.edu.

Wayne Holder papers, Box 8, Hoover Institution Archives.
This work is protected by privacy and copyright laws and is provided for educational and research purposes only. Any infringing use may be subject to disciplinary action and/or civil or criminal liability as provided by law. If you object to Hoover's use of this image, please contact archives@hoover.stanford.edu.

An Unexpected Letter

A recent reference inquiry about the Jacques Benoist-Méchin papers reminded me that the completion of a finding aid for a collection is not the end of the story when it comes to the process of archival arrangement and description. There is an additional element that comes from the input of researchers using the finding aid and scrutinizing the materials in the collection. This often gives us a fuller or corrected picture of both the documents and the person that they pertain to.

In working on the papers of Jacques Benoist-Méchin, a French intellectual and Nazi sympathizer who served in the Vichy administration in France during World War II, my main focus was on his wartime experience, which is what he was primarily known for. And for the most part, the initial researchers using the papers focused on those aspects of his career.

The most recent inquiry, however, was quite different, in that it had nothing to do with Vichy or the Nazis. A Canadian professor, the editor of a large volume of the letters of Aldous Huxley, wrote to ask about the reference to Huxley in the correspondence series of the Benoist-Méchin papers. There was only one letter, written by Huxley to Benoist-Méchin in 1932, but the Huxley expert was intrigued enough to request a copy of it.

The subject of the letter turned out to be author D.H. Lawrence, whose work Benoist-Méchin had translated into French. In his letter, Huxley comments favorably on Benoist-Méchin’s introduction to his translation, but he also points out an error Benoist-Méchin had made concerning Lawrence’s grandfather. Wanting to learn more, the Huxley expert decided to track down Benoist-Méchin’s original piece on Lawrence.

Before his fateful involvement in politics, Benoist-Méchin had made a reputation for himself in France as a literary scholar and translator. This reference inquiry made me more aware of this dimension of Benoist-Méchin’s complicated personality. It also showed that there are facets to collections, and different ways that they may prove useful to researchers, besides the ones that may seem obvious.


A letter written by Aldous Huxley to Jacques Benoist-Méchin, June 25, 1932. Jacques Benoist-Méchin Papers, Box 4, Folder 27, Hoover Institution Archives.