“To honour the dead and as a warning to the living. In memory of the Jews deported from Germany, Austria and Czechia, who from December 1941 to June 1942 died from hunger, cold and inhumanity and have found eternal rest in the Salaspils forest”
This is the inscription—in Hebrew, Latvian, and German—on one of the monuments in Salaspils, commemorating the impact of the brutal three-year Nazi occupation of Latvia on this area. Officially, this site was designated as the "Salaspils Police Prison and Re-Education Through Labor Camp," but in reality, it was more comparable to a concentration camp in how prisoners were treated, organised, and forced to work.
Having spent the past seven years in Europe, witnessing frequent reminders of the Nazi atrocities, the full scope of the Holocaust remains suprising. In Latvia alone, 70,000 Jews were killed over three years, representing about three-quarters of the entire Jewish population. This is in addition to the significant number of Roma, communists, and mentally disabled individuals who were also murdered.
The German term "Nie Wieder," meaning "never again," is so important.
