Curatorial Statement

Karen Frostig

The Silence

The “Locker of Memory” project is a story telling project, grounded in rigorous archival research, and extensive scientific surveys of the land, conducted by esteemed historians and world-renowned geospatial scientists. The work is dedicated to recovering the history of this forgotten camp.

All documents and photos related to the camp’s history were destroyed by Nazis in the throes of defeat, and possibly by post-war occupying Soviet forces. Park renovations resurfaced the area. Any recoverable data exists undisturbed, underground. One sentence on a sign makes an oblique reference to the camp but fails to portray the site as the first Nazi concentration camp in Latvia established under German occupation. A notorious killing site, the camp imprisoned 3985 German and Austrian Jews rendered stateless, secluded on a a remote patch of land without a viable means of escape. Twenty-seven survivors were present when the camp, rebranded as an agricultural farm, closed in 1944.

The Nuremburg laws established in 1935 in Germany and 1938 in Austria stripped Jews of their civil liberties and constitutional rights. Jews were also designated “subjects of the state.”  Once deported from the homeland with passports seized, Jews became officially stateless. The troubling history of why Germany and Austria have not reclaimed these stateless Jews and properly memorialized the site prompts my work as the granddaughter of murdered victims at Jungfernhof. The Locker of Memory project serves all of the victims of this camp, who have been unremembered for 80 years.  

The steadfast silence surrounding the Skirotava train station and the Jungfernhof concentration camp to this day, is surprising. The two sites located three kilometers outside of Latvia’s capital city, share egregious histories concerning the murder of thousands of Jews between 1941-1944. Mass graves surround the Skirotava train station and populate the Jungfernhof concentration camp, leaving no visible trace of human remains for subsequent generations to ponder or even, to memorialize. Both sites lack commemorative text for different reasons. 

Forty-seven years of Soviet occupation between 1944-1990, explains the suppression of Holocaust history concerning Jewish victims murdered in Latvia. The Skirotava train station carries additional history. Starting in 1949 under Soviet occupation, mass deportations of more than 42,000 Latvians were deported to labor camps or gulags in Siberia. A large sign appeared in 2014, detailing the history of Latvian deportations, and is now prominently situated at the site.

Presenting multiple national narratives of murder at a single site is not an easy task. It takes time to process loss and explore issues of responsibility. It is especially difficult to work with three countries dealing with different histories of accountability.

Frostig conceived and designed the deportation video project in 2020, receiving initial support from the Memorial Foundation for Jewish Culture (MFJC). Partnering with the German Embassy in Latvia in 2021, permissions to project the deportation video onto the Skirotava train station never materialized. Covid complicated matters. All travel in and out of Latvia was banned.

Curating the Slides

Frostig spent close to a year searching for relevant images of deportations to Riga, which she found online and in collaboration with searches made by project historians. In the final call, most of the photos were found online, lacking proper context. Frostig worked with a photo lab to upgrade the resolution for projections and used photoshop and cropping sparingly, only when deemed necessary to improve a coherent reading of an image. The photos are largely preserved as is without any manipulation.

Frostig organized the photos into a linear narrative. Telling the story of the 1941 deportations to Riga began with photos of Jews rounded up for deportation. Capturing endless hours of waiting at various collection points, the images portray invasive handling of personal belongings coupled with promises of “resettlement,” the favored pretext used to reassure anxious deportees who remained clueless about where they were headed. Document confiscation, rampant theft, and endless lines of Jews carrying their life’s possessions while boarding trains, concludes with images of mass graves exhumed and erased with new trees planted on top of the graves. Most notable are missing photographs documenting the treatment of Jews at the Skirotava train station and the Jungfernhof concentration camp. Historians of the Locker of Memory project diligently recovered stories of murder, buried at both sites.

A plan to project large iconic slides onto the façade of the Skirotava train station, commemorating the 80th anniversary of the deportations to Riga, was interrupted by covid and travel restrictions. While there may be alternative sites to explore, the prospect of having large imposing images of murdered Jews and their names making contact with the building where these initial crimes took place, is significant. Capturing the meeting ground between the past and the present, the slides are used as a medium of disruption. By projecting the 1941 Deportations to Riga video directly onto the façade of the Skirotava train station, the video would break through 80 years of silence, and represent an enormous advancement regarding the triadic responsibility of this dire history.

The forty-five slides beginning with round-up photos from Laupheim, Wurzburg, and Bielefeld, are followed by a formal focus on the four transports from Nuremberg, Stuttgart, Vienna, and Hamburg. Videographer Nikolajs Krasnopevcevs stitched the images together according to plan, created a scrolling overlay of 3985 victims’ names, and attached a sound track.

The orderly presentation of processing thousands of Jews onto transports was amply documented. However, there are no photos of what the interiors cabins looked like, seating arrangements, storage for luggage, lighting, access to water, toilets, and the changing presence and demeanor of SS Officers on board. The arrival at Skirotava train station marks a significant change in representation. Lacking photographic documentation of how unsuspecting Jews disembarking from the trains were confronted with armed guards and barking dogs, and the arduous trek through snow and ice to arrive at the Jungfernhof concentration camp, we must rely on survivors’ testimonies to learn of the hardships endured. The narrative resumes by capturing multiple imprisonments that followed, at the Riga Ghetto, Salaspils concentration camp, the Kaiserwald concentration camp, and the sites of major massacres in Latvia’s dark forests. The progression from loss, to despair, to anguish is palpable. Also visible are changes in dress and spirit regarding the pre-Skirotava and post-Skirotava presentation. Conditions of dehumanization, frigid climate, filthy ill-fitting garments, inhumane treatment, unbearable hunger, the complete loss of power, and the inevitable surrender to death is fully apparent in these 45 slides. To imagine the scale and drama of these images and their barbaric simplicity, projected onto the sole remaining symbol of power, the Skirotava train station, would be a crushing image to witness, in the cold, at night, on the anniversary of these horrific deportations.