My inspiration: Vanessa Curtis on the 30,000 lost Jews of Riga
|
Version 0 of 1. Just over two years ago, I found out from my mother that I had ancestors who had lived in Latvia. This was a total surprise, because I had always naively assumed that these ancestors must have hailed from the outskirts of London, which is where most of my mother’s immediate family lived. Armed with this new knowledge, I began to research Latvia on the internet, never guessing that what I found out would lead me to write a novel The Earth is Singing. My great-grandmother was born Ita Edie Michalowitz in the 1880s in a small village just outside Riga, the capital of Latvia. She came over to the East End of London long before the second world war broke out and set up as a seamstress, marrying my Polish great-grandfather. She was Jewish, and the more I found out on the internet about the Jews of Riga, the more I realised that my great-grandmother had had a very lucky escape, for nearly all 30,000 of Riga’s Jewish citizens had been murdered by the Nazis in the Rumbula forest in the winter of 1941. Although l had learned at school about the atrocities of Auschwitz and the Warsaw Ghetto, I had never heard about what was going on in Riga and other Eastern European cities at the same time. I decided that I would like to see where my great-grandmother and her family had lived, so I visited Riga in 2012. One afternoon, I spent several hours at the Riga Ghetto Museum, set close to the area of the original ghetto buildings (which still survive). The exhibition displayed countless black and white photographs of Riga’s pre-war Jewish population including many of university students, their eyes dark and serious and full of hope for a future which was not to be. Those eyes seemed to follow me around the museum, persistent to the point at which I had the feeling that I was being asked to do something. I shivered when I realised that I could have been looking at photographs of my great-grandmother’s relatives without knowing. I tried to shake the feeling, but it would not leave me and that is how The Earth is Singing was born. On my return home, I set out to document the events of the Riga ghetto and Rumbula forest in a young adult novel, using a framework based closely upon those appalling events from the autumn of 1941. The research was exhaustive and harrowing, but by now I was firmly set upon bringing the story of the Jews of Riga, for so many years hidden behind the Iron Curtain, to a far wider audience. Even though I realised I might be telling the tragic story of my own ancestors I did not shy away from portraying the tragedy of the Rumbula forest massacre in stark, graphic scenes. But, mindful of the fact that I was writing a YA novel, I chose to tell the story through the eyes of 15-year-old Hanna Michelson, a Jewish ballet student whose father has already been deported at the time of the 1940 Soviet occupation. Hanna’s story is traumatic, but it is not without hope. Three Latvians did in fact survive the Rumbula forest massacre, one by burrowing under a pile of clothes and shoes taken from the victims. I took my inspiration from those extraordinary, rare tales of survival. The Earth is Singing is dedicated to the great-grandmother from Riga who I never knew. I hope also that it will honour the memory of Riga’s 30,000 lost Jews. Vanessa Curtis is the author YA novels including Zelah Green and The Haunting of Tabitha Grey. The Earth is Singing is her first historical novel, published today, on Holocaust Memorial Day and the 70th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau. |