Karen Frostig speaks about her family at
the UN General Assembly
With the portraits of her grandparents flanking her, Karen Frostig tells the United Nations of her efforts to commemorate the concentration camp where they died. .Credit...Hilary Swift for The New York Time
On Holocaust Remembrance Day, the U.N. Hears of a Little-Known Killing Field
At the United Nations’ annual ceremony to mark the Nazi horrors, Karen Frostig described her work to commemorate a concentration camp where thousands of Jews, including her grandparents, were murdered.
When Karen Frostig made her way to the podium of a packed United Nations General Assembly on Friday, the projections of grainy passport photos of her grandparents, Moses and Beile Samuely Frostig, towered above her.
These images had been in the living room of her childhood home in Waltham, Mass., outside Boston, the only portraits that hung in the house. But they weren’t much discussed. No one in the Frostig home wanted to talk about the Holocaust, about how Moses and Beile, Jews who lived in Vienna, had been loaded onto trains that the Germans sent into the forests of Latvia.
Published Jan. 27, 2023Updated Jan. 28, 2023
Ralph Blumenthal has written extensively about the hunt for Nazi war criminals and the Holocaust. He covered West Germany for The New York Times in 1968-69.
Karen Frostig’s ‘Locker of Memory’ reclaims lost Holocaust history
‘No memorial works unless people participate in remembering,’ says the cultural historian and ‘public memory artist,’ who teaches at Lesley University
By Cate McQuaid Globe Correspondent,Updated January 29, 2023, 12:01 a.m.
Karen Frostig photographed at her home. Her "Locker of Memory" project is a memorial to victims of Jungfernhof concentration camp, which was on the outskirts of Riga, Latvia.SUZANNE KREITER/GLOBE STAFF
When Karen Frostig was a child in the 1950s and ‘60s, passport photos of her paternal grandparents hung on the wall of her house in Waltham. Frostig’s father, as a young Jewish man, had fled Vienna in 1938 and ultimately landed in Cuba. In late 1941, his parents were deported to Jungfernhof, the first Nazi concentration camp in Latvia. They died there, probably within months
The “1941 Deportations to Riga” video was shown at Corner House, within the Museum of the Occupation of Latvia on January 27, 2023, International Holocaust Remembrance Day. Developed as a day-long installation, the video ran concurrent with Karen Frostig’s presentation about her family and her work as a public memory artist, delivered to the UN General Assembly Headquarters in New York City, as part of their annual Holocaust Remembrance Day program.
Under Soviet occupation, Corner House in Riga was the former headquarters of the KGB secret police. Selected as a suitable environment for displaying a video about German occupation in Latvia, Corner House is noted for its grim history. Today, Corner House lives in an unheated building with narrow corridors and musty smelling rooms containing tiny prison cells and torture chambers. Numerous panels describe Latvian life under Soviet occupation. Latvians were often seen as “undesirables” in their own country, arrested without provocation, deported to Siberia, where many were killed. While the two histories of occupation are distinctly different, they share common reference points concerning deportation, imprisonment, torture, and murder.
Up until 2020, the Jungfernhof concentration camp remained an abandoned site without a history. In 2013, beautification work was undertaken by the city of Riga to establish the Masjumpravas manor site and recreational park. However, even the most beautiful park cannot mask the gnawing presence of an unmarked mass grave. As part of the Locker of Memory’s initiative to restore memory to the Jungfernhof concentration camp, maps, interactive timelines, testimonial interviews, videos, and trial transcripts are presented online as interactive teaching tools designed to unlock the history of this unremembered site.
"1941 Deportations to Riga” Corner House, Museum of the Occupation of Latvia (2023). Narrator Ilja Lenskis and videographer Nikolajs Krasnopevcevs.
“1941 Deportations to Riga” Installed at Corner House
on Holocaust Remembrance Day
Featured Report of Karen Frostig’s work funded by IHRA (International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance)
By Judy Bolton-Fasman for JewishBoston
Memorializing an Overlooked Chapter in Holocaust History: Jungfernhof
Newton’s Karen Frostig will tell her grandparents’ Holocaust story at the United Nations on International Holocaust Remembrance Day.
TOP PICK JANUARY 25, 2023
Multimedia artist Karen Frostig will speak to the United Nations General Assembly on International Holocaust Remembrance Day, Jan. 27, 2023, about her new project, “Locker of Memory.” In this latest work, Frostig memorializes the 4,000 Jews murdered in Jungfernhof, Latvia’s first concentration camp established under Nazi occupation, located three miles outside Riga and a concentration camp that is often overlooked in Holocaust history. The series of memorials will consist of four panels corresponding to the four transports to
PROJECT AIMS TO FIND EVIDENCE OF SITE'S 'ERASED' MASS GRAVES
Obscure Nazi concentration camp in Latvia put back on map by art professor
Karen Frostig’s ‘Locker of Memory’ project unites Jungfernhof survivors and descendants, officials in Latvia, around Holocaust ‘memory work’ including plan for on-site memorial
By MATT LEBOVIC | 20 April 2023, 5:16 am
70 Years of Exile by Karen Frostig (Courtesy)
A lush park outside Latvia’s capital will soon house a memorial to victims of Nazi Germany’s Jungfernhof concentration camp, which operated on the site during World War II.
Beginning in late 1941, about 4,000 Jews were deported to the “improvised” Jungfernhof camp outside Riga. Nearly all of them were murdered or worked to death within several months, including the grandparents of Massachusetts- based public art expert Karen Frostig.
“There is nothing that remains at this site. No records, no photos,” Frostig told The Times of Israel on the heels of remarks she gave at the United Nations for International Holocaust Remembrance Day in January.