- Avishai Teicher/Wikimedia Commons
- The Rumbula Forest Memorial in Latvia
There appear to be an unofficial series of Holocaust documentaries taking place around town this week. Yesterday the University of Chicago screened Nazi propaganda films about the Theresienstadt concentration camp, and today Claude Lanzmann’s The Last of the Unjust begins its run at the Music Box. On March 23 at 11 AM local filmmaker Mitchell Lieber will screen excerpts from his work in progress, Rumbula’s Echo, at the Chicago Cultural Center. The movie recounts the Rumbula Massacre of late 1941, in which Nazi firing squads murdered roughly 25,000 Latvian and German Jews in the Rumbula Forest in Riga over a period of only two days. Lieber will attend the screening along with Glenview resident Sia Hertsberg, who survived the massacre and is featured in the film. Tickets are free, but attendees are encouraged to reserve their seats—you can do so here.
Historians estimate that 72,000 of Latvia’s Jews (roughly 98 percent of the country’s total Jewish population) died during the Second World War. Most of them perished in 1941, before the Nazi death camps were even built.
Correction: This post has been amended to reflect that Rumbula’s Echo screens on March 23.