My name is Karen Elizabeth Frostig.
I am named after my grandmother, Beile Samuely. Her assimilated name, required by the Austrian government, was Bette Frostig.
For 25 years, I painted abstract images. In the late 1990’s, I began taking photos and playing around with Photoshop. I started to experiment with what was real and what was fiction. In 2001, I became interested in my family’s Holocaust history. Using Photoshop to collapse time and space, I would stand next to my grandmother on a local street, turning the extraordinary into the ordinary.
On a mission to recover my family’s history, I traveled to Vienna in 2006 and to Riga in 2007. The family apartment on Salzergasse had been torn down. Without a specific address, I looked on the streets for clues about my family’s past. In Riga, the Jungfernhof concentration camp existed theoretically, but without a specific location. In both countries, I began to observe the practice of public memory noting two contradictory forces, the urge to remember and the urge to forget.
This page tells the story about my family’s history and about my practice as a public memory artist.
Letter date December 18, 1938. Signed Moses and mother.
The Story
I grew up in a home filled with emotion, encased in silence. Conflict was a distraction. The deeper feelings never bore fruit.
I began my work as a public memory artist in 2002, when a small forest across the street from my home was cut down. The tree carcasses strewn along the hillside reminded me of murdered Jews shot and scattered across Eastern Europe’s northern countryside, by the Einsatzgruppen--mobile killing units-- during the Nazi occupation. “Earth Wounds” included a public burial ceremony for the trees, which I later realized, was an expression of belated mourning for members of my family murdered in the Holocaust. During the execution of this project, I inherited 69 letters, written by my grandparents to my father in exile, between August 1, 1938 and November 4, 1941. As I read these letters for the first time, I listened closely to my grandparents’ voices. I was moved by the content of their letters, how they comforted my father, how they worried about their three children each traveling alone without money or plan, their desperate pleas for help and their frank disclosures about fear and uncertainty at home.
In 1969, my father received a document sent by the Israelitische Kultusgemeinde Wien (IKG), indicating that his parents were deported from Vienna to Riga, on December 3, 1941. Under National Socialism, the IKG were responsible for drawing up the deportation lists.
All other details were missing. Following years of research, I now know that my grandparents traveled on Transport number 13 for three days and nights in darkness, without food, water, adequate seating or bathroom facilities.
International Tracing Services archive. Retrieved 2012.
Almost four thousand Jews from Nuremberg, Vienna, Hamburg and Stuttgart debarked from four different transports at the Skirotava Train Station during the first week of December, 1941. They were immediately confronted by Nazis armed with rifles, pistols, clubs and attack dogs, barking orders at the dazed and frightened prisoners to relinquish their possessions and march two kilometers to the Jungfernhof concentration camp. This makeshift camp was located at an abandoned farm manor, four kilometers outside of Riga, Latvia. When they arrived, there were no barracks, beds, barbed wire or watch towers. Under orders from Rudolf Seck, SS Oberscharführer (commandant), a mobile patrol of Latvian auxiliary police guarded the borders of the camp. There was no chance for escape. The surrounding landscape was barren.
Skirotava Train Station (2007)
I first visited the Jungfernhof concentration camp in 2007 and again in 2010. Most notable during these visits, was the presence of garbage and the lack of signage at the site. Published testimony and personal diaries indicate that a mass grave was located at the site, containing up to 800 bodies. The Dünamünde Action occurred on March 26, 1942. About 1,840-2,000 Austrian and German Jews, mostly elderly and young children, were taken to the Bikernieki Forest, stripped naked and shot into mass graves by the Einsatzgruppen (paramilitary death squads), face down “sardine style.”
Photo of the entrance of the Jungfernhof concentration camp (2007)
Bikernieki forest (2007)
Four hundred and fifty young adults remained at the camp, which was turned into a slave labor agricultural farm. The camp was closed in 1943. The remaining prisoners were transferred to the Riga Ghetto and to other neighboring camps. One hundred and forty-eight people survived this ordeal.
In February 2019, I returned to Riga to present a new proposal to the Eastern District Council, for a Naming Memorial at this forgotten camp. At the time of my presentation, I was told about the camp’s transformation into a recreational park and extended promenade along the Daugavu River, as part of a larger urban renewal initiative.
Early History of the Site
The history of the site remains sketchy. Below is a compilation of online summaries about the site. The site contains a long history of ownership, seizure of the land and transfer of property. One of the primary tasks of the Lock(er) of Memory project, is to locate the Jungfernhof concentration camp within the history of what preceded and followed the camp’s existence between 1941-1943. The project historian will be tasked to produce a detailed history of the site.
Mazjumpravmuiža is one of the oldest estates in the Riga area. Earliest records indicate that the land was under the control of Archbishop Albert of the Cistercian Monastery of Jacob's Church. In 1259, the manor was home to the Cistercian nuns. By the end of the 16th century, the manor became the property of the Riga Jesuits. During the siege of Riga in 1709, different skirmishes took place between the Swedes and the Russians for control of the area…
At the start of 18th century, Paul Brockhausen, the head of the Riga Landmark, became the owner of the manor and in 1752, the estate was sold to the city of Riga. By 1794 there were 3,357 inhabitants living on the manor’s land (this number is curiously close to the number of Reich Jews imprisoned at the camp between 1941 and 1943). In 1877, the manor which included 16 buildings, a water mill and pub, was leased by the City of Riga to Johann Ratfeld. In the 19th century the house was occupied by the painter Johann Heinrich Baumann, father of Johann Friedrich Baumann, the first Latvian architect. The site was abandoned in 1915 and in 1916/1917, Russian troops established a supply farm and deployed a flight unit there. The Soviet government gave the manor and land to the Riga Polytechnic in 1919, who established agricultural training farms. Soon after, Bermont troops plundered the site, and in 1920, a Latvian youth union organization, Katlakalns, established a cultural center at the remains of the manor.
In 1941, the ruined manor house and buildings were turned into a concentration camp, imprisoning close to 4,000 Jews from Austria and Germany. The camp, also identified as a slave labor and transit camp, was closed in 1943. After the second world war, the manor territory was taken over by the Soviet Army. The manor house was used as a clinic for Russian pilots. (Content retrieved from online sources, government websites, blogs, and travel bureaus). Across seven centuries, changes to the site’s ownership and function proved to be remarkably repetitive.
Archival map of Riga, Lativa (1791). Jungfernhof is highlighted with a circle.
Mazjumpravas muiža (1798). Drawing by Johans Kristofs Broce.
The early images of the Jungfernhof concentration camp that I encountered in 2007, are seared in my mind’s eye. The degeneration of the site was consistent with the murderous history of the concentration camp.
In 2007, the site was uninhabited land without a name or a history. I could not anticipate what kind of transformation had taken place.
Road to Jungfernhof (2007). Photo: Karen Frostig
Entrance Mural to the Mazjumpravmuiža estate and Recreation Park (2019). Photo: Karen Frostig
Today’s picturesque park is a celebration of a land with a history that dates back to 1259. Reinstated with pedestrian bridges, benches, a delightful pond with a fountain, a museum and cultural center, bird watching towers and a long winding promenade along the Daugava River for pedestrians, bicyclists and runners, the park is populated with Latvians looking for a brief respite from city life. How will a memorial project inhabit this space?
Cultural heritage is generally perceived as a national asset. Countries that honor a rich cultural heritage tend to thrive. In the 21st century, an era where truth is valued over fiction, how do we accept today’s definition of cultural heritage that must also include the darker stories that live in the shadows of a conflicted past. While Latvia has many competing stories about loss, the Jungfernhof concentration camp exists on its own timeline, as a story about stateless Jews, deported to Riga for the sole purpose of extermination. How might the process of locating a naming memorial to the victims of the Jungfernhof concentration camp, support Latvian, Austrian and Germany’s ongoing process of coming to terms with a difficult past? The Jungfernhof concentration camp was located on this land. Its sorrowful history is inextricably linked to the region’s larger story.
Relevant projects
I come to the Lock(er) of Memory, having completed three prior public art projects about Holocaust memory. In each project, I asked a different question: What is the meaning of the life cycle when murder intervenes? How does my Austrian citizenship impact my voice, as a critically engaged artist, examining the history of memory in Austria? and What happens when we forget to remember?
The Vienna Project was the first public naming memorial in the city of Vienna to name seven targeted groups consisting of more than 85,000 Austrian victims, murdered under National Socialism. By comparison, the story of the Jungfernhof concentration camp tells an intimate story about murder, located on the outskirts of Riga.
I conceived and implemented the Locker of Memory project in February 2019. I serve as Director and Producer of the memorial project. The project is dedicated to memorializing 3,836 Jewish prisoners who were murdered at the Jungfernhof concentration camp, killed in a nearby forest, or who died of starvation and inhumane treatment at the site. In designing the memorial, I am aware that the project curves inward. Having traveled the arc from the personal to the public, and now back to the personal, I am working with a few interrelated questions: How do I integrate my voice as an artist, cultural historian and granddaughter of victims, into the larger matrix of Latvia’s collective memory? How do I work with Latvians, a country carrying a long history of occupation, as an outsider holding a personal story and claim to the land? What kinds of conversations and collaborations can I establish with local Latvians that will foster new expressions of mutual tolerance, creativity and cooperation? Given 21st century technologies, we can no longer bury the past. How do I create an inclusive environment, where memory prompts an appreciation for our shared sense of humanity.
The Vienna Project (2013-2014)
The Vienna Project was developed as a social action memory project, dealing with Austria’s history under National Socialism. Designed as an enduring “performance of the archives,” The Vienna Project was installed on the streets of Vienna in 16 districts, to unfold over the course of one year. Thirty-eight memory sites, complicit with Nazism, where crimes of aggression, humiliation and murder as well as sites of rescue took place, were sprayed with stencils asking the question What happens when we forget to remember? in ten languages. The Vienna Project’s Naming Memorial was the culminating focus of closing events. More than 85,000 victims’ names were projected onto the exterior façade of the Austrian National Library at the Hofburg Palace. The Vienna Project, commemorating the 75th anniversary of the Anschluss, remains the only public Naming Memorial in Austria to definitively dismantle the Austrian victim myth.
The Vienna Project’s Naming Memorial. Conceptual artist and project director Karen Frostig conceived the memorial design, which was realized by video artist Elisabeth Wildling (2014). Josefsplatz. Photo credit: Christian Wind.
“The Vienna Project from Opening to Closing” (2014). Videographer Mathias Janko.
Exiled Memory Project (2008)
“Exiled Memories” represented a transnational, inter-generational conversation about the Holocaust, addressing ideas about inherited memory and the long-term effects of genocide on survivors and their descendants. The project considered the intersection of personal and public memory and dealt with ideas about presence and absence, memory and voice, and rupture and repair. In commemoration of the 70th anniversary of the Anschluss, a solo exhibition of twelve memory panels entitled “Erinnerung aus dem Exil/Exiled Memories,” was installed in 2008 at Juridicum, University of Vienna, Department for Philosophy of Law, Culture and Religion, Vienna, Austria. The panels became part of the university’s permanent collection.
Karen Frostig, (2008). 70 Years of Exile. Archival inkjet print mounted to aluminum, 35 x 25.”
Earth Wounds (2003)
Earth Wounds was a multimedia project dealing with the sociopolitical ramifications of death and violation occurring at two different points in time: the pending destruction of twenty acres of Massachusetts woodland across the street from my home and the death of my grandparents in the Holocaust. The project bore witness to murder as a profound instance of violation, while reworking such atrocity to denote death as an ongoing cyclical event. The project also spoke to murder and the symbolic nature of burial practice as a “return” to the earth, as a means of achieving a partial resolution for losses while providing a vision of hope through a sense of renewal. Earth was employed as a restorative element that reawakened the need to mourn and the need for closure. A second element, occurred early in the development of this project, that of September 11th. The uncanny and compelling synchrony of this event, in terms of timing and symbolic content, was also embodied in the artistic process.
Karen Frostig (2001). Mourning Shroud. 45 x 40 x4”.