Walking Since Daybreak

...T he principal lesson Eksteins draws from the Second World War in the land of his birth is that the war involved a moral complication that most Americans have not had to reckon with...

...Clearly most Latvians had no part in the Holocaust, just as most Jews had nothing to do with the Bolshevik terror...

...Once the terror conducted by peasant insurrectionists died down, counter-terror followed...

...That's all there is to it...

...As the Soviets were driving out the Nazis, the Eksteins family fled Latvia...

...Name: (Please Prim) Address: City: State: Zip: Date of change: L VCAFRMJ T he prevailing Anglo-American memory of the Second World War is of heroism triumphant...

...During the first Soviet occupation, which lasted from June 1940 until June 1941, some 40,000 Latvians were murdered or deported...

...Educated in Canada and at Oxford, Eksteins has come around to repudiate the Anglo-American historical tradition in which he was reared...

...One unit of the Latvian auxiliary police, Kommando Arajs, which drew 44 In the land of his birth the war involved a moral complication most Americans have not had to reckon with...

...Yet Eksteins, in his audacious but not indelicate manner, points out that many Jews greeted the conquering Soviet army with the same enthusiasm many ethnic Latvians showed for the conquering German army, and that during the Soviet occupation there were more Jews in conspicuous official positions, giving orders or just following them—most notably in the Soviet secret police—than there had ever been before...

...Eksteins believes that the war was precisely the excuse Latvians had been waiting for to unloose their longpent hatred: "Holocaust was a state of mind here before it was Nazi policy...

...A shell exploded hard by mother and son, who had left the dank cellar to enjoy a moment's sunshine, and a fragment grazed Eksteins in the temple...

...The Polish-born Oxford historian Lewis Namier would write, "The hatred which the Lettish peasantry in the Baltic provinces feels against the German landowners is unequaled anywhere in Europe...

...This is by no means new ground, and it has been exploited by the foulest people for the foulest reasons...

...the Latvian memory is of getting through it alive...

...As the Landeswehr advanced upon Estonia, two Latvian divisions, armed with British help and reinforced by Estonians, took on the Baltic German force and put it to flight...

...he was then eight months old...

...Of course, humanity could have been saved without a world war that left 46 million dead...

...The German nobility soon took root in the newly acquired province...

...Eksteins's uncle Arturs Vajeiks was arrested for hiding a rifle in his attic, and disappeared into the gulag darkness...

...heavily for its manpower on college boys and members of the native fascist organization Thunder Cross, put more than 26,000 Jews to death...

...It was a catchy idea, combining modern efficiency with a savage appreciation for the macabre...

...The campaign was one of notable brutality...

...The Allies were conducting frequent air raids on the city, and the Eksteinses were soon bombed out of their living quarters...

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...The Allies who visited such terrible devastation on German cities were fighting for their lives, indeed for the very life of civilized humanity...

...No sooner was the new nation founded than it found itself in mortal danger...

...The Latvians repulsed this assault, then undertook to drive the attackers from their land...

...The British and Americans doubtless felt some of the grim joy of vengeance as they bombed Germany to rubble, but while the German war aim was pure monstrosity, the death or enslavement of entire races, the Allies' aim was peace and freedom, even for their defeated enemies...

...68 October 19 9 9 • The American Spectator...

...When public disorder erupted throughout Russia in 1905, in Latvia it was the Baltic Germans who bore the brunt of the popular rage...

...and the life of the great landowners, some of whom traced their descent to the crusading knights, "was probably the most pleasant form of lordly existence in the world," as an admiring German dignitary was to observe in 1918...

...they came from White Russia most likely, and probably originated far to the south of there...

...In July 1941, as Hitler's Operation Barbarossa made great advances, Latvians hailed the invading Germans as liberators...

...Small countries are safe only so long as great powers are willing and able to protect them...

...the latter begins in the present and proceeds backward, so that the two narrative strands end in Stunde Null, Zero Hour, as the Germans referred to May 1945, when the world was consumed and began anew...

...An army consisting chiefly of the Baltic German Landeswehr, but also comprising Germans from Germany, White Russians, and a few Latvian battalions, liberated Riga in May 1919...

...only in 1991 did his family find out for certain that he had received the death sentence...

...What then were the sentiments with which fundamentally decent people—including a good many who were not altogether innocent of anti-Semitism — regarded the monumental indecencies their countrymen committed...

...By war's end, "some 140,000 Latvians had fought with the Germans, some 65,000 with the Russians...

...however, one does not doubt that Eksteins is acting in good faith here, in his effort to render a complex truth...

...The Latvian distaste for and legal oppression of Jews, and the concomitant Jewish resentment of Latvians, did not begin with the Second World War...

...The action was never far away...

...Eksteins suggests that the British and Americans, whose ruthless aerial campaign destroyed Hamburg, Dresden, and Berlin, were as criminal as the Germans and Latvians who carried out the Holocaust...

...Before long, though, "the sense that one evil had been replaced by another grew...

...Most Latvians who killed Jews claimed to do so for what they deemed an unexceptionable reason: The Jews were Bolsheviks...

...Modris Eksteins, a Canadian professor who was born in Latvia in 1943, is not old enough to remember the Second World War, but he has it on sound testimony that his was an eventful infancy...

...A small country squeezed between two great imperial powers—which happened to be the most evil 66 October 1999 • The American Spectator regimes in history—Latvia had to submit to every humiliation and torture that Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia could devise for her...

...name of the Holy Roman (that is to say, German) Empire...

...The main point of Eksteins's book is that Latvian suffering has something essential to teach Britons and Americans that they apparently cannot learn from their own experience...

...The Red Army took Riga, the Latvian capital, in January 1919, and the Latvian government fled town...

...Latvian nationalists still had to pry their country from the German grasp...

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...but while it is Eksteins's intention to unsettle the self-regard of great nations and to reassert the dignity of small ones, in fact his sad history teaches that countries like Latvia will never be able to avert such suffering through their own efforts...

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...Overnight, terror changed sides...

...Box 655, Mt...

...he could never understand why...

...As agreed in the secret protocol of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, the treaty of Nazi-Soviet friendship signed just before war began, the Soviet Union was the first to have its way with Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia...

...1945 is our problem...

...The "devastation, displacement, and horror" of the war taint not just "a few madmen and their befuddled followers" but all humanity, including those who consider themselves to have been humanity's saviors...

...As far as the worst of men are concerned, this is surely true...

...The Baltic German aristocracy led Russian soldiers in "punitive expeditions" that killed over 2,000 Latvians and razed 300 peasant farms...

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...the question Eksteins leaves hanging is how many Latvians shared this state of mind, and to what degree...

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...The Allied bombings were horrifically cruel, but they served a high purpose — perhaps as high a purpose as any act of war can serve...

...In all of Riga not a single coffin was to be found," wrote a Latvian who eluded the executioners...

...Captive Bolsheviks were required to dig a mass grave for themselves, then to fall neatly into it as they were shot...

...Still something of a novelty, Bolshevik terror diligently went about making a name foritself...

...In all, 95,000 Latvian Jews were reduced to fewer than 5,000 —"the highest percentage of eradication in all of Europe...

...Hoping to find refuge in Sweden or Switzerland, they wound up instead in Berlin, "the capital city of hell...

...BOOKS IN REVIEW Hell in a Very Small Place Walking Since Daybreak: A Story of Eastern Europe, World War II, and the Heart of Our Century Modris Eksteins Houghton Mifflin / 258 pages / $27.50 REVIEWED BY Algis Valiunas E astern Europeans of a certain age have war stories to tell that stop the breath of everybody listening...

...The life of the Latvian peasantry was less agreeable...

...The Bolsheviks had actually been the first to put it into practice, and both the Soviets and the Nazis would employ the procedure during their respective occupations of Latvia twenty-some years later...

...With the collapse of the Russian and German empires in World War I, Latvian nationalists took advantage of the opening to declare an independent Latvia in November 1918...

...This social arrangement survived the seemingly endless wars of the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries, which saw Kurland come under Swedish, Polish, and then Russian domination...

...but it took the war to turn this long-standing antipathy into raging murderous fury...

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...The Letts, like the Lithuanians and Prussians, settled on the shores of the Baltic Sea around 2000 B.C...

...many learned lessons in atrocity that they would find useful later in life...

...The American Spectator • October 1999 67 r MOVING...

...Trouble began for the Letts when German traders descended on the region in the twelfth century A.D., ardent for amber, honey, wax, leather...

...Britain, America, France were guilty of cowardice and folly in the face of evil...

...and in Walking Since Daybreak he writes that his need to understand what the war did to him and his family made a historian of him...

...Perhaps he would have been taken in the next round-up, had the Nazis not turned on their friends and hurled the Soviets back toward Moscow...

...The Baltic role in the Nazi evil is the most disturbing part of Eksteins's tale...

...Throughout, the Baltic Germans continued as the prevailing political, economic, and cultural force there...

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...His book interweaves the history of Latvia, which takes in his family history, with the story of his own life...

...The worst things that happened in 1945 might have been avoided had prudent and decisive measures been taken in 1935...

...the Germans and Latvians who murdered Jews did so for the pleasure of destruction...

...They paid for their failings, but there were other nations, like Latvia, that paid still more...

...missionaries soon followed, ardent for souls, and, when the locals proved violently disinclined to give up their worship of innumerable woodland gods for the one true faith, the crusading Order of Sword-brothers and the Teutonic Knights were called in to subdue the natives in the ALGIS VALIUNAS is a writer living in Florida...

...the triumphalist aura" that envelops the Anglo-American attitude toward history and culture is decidedly not to his taste...

...The Nazis, the Soviets, the British, the Americans all had a crack at killing the infant Eksteins, and the full-grown author has bitter words for them all...

...In August 1944 the Eksteinses, who had fled Riga for the author's mother's family farm, found themselves caught in the crossfire between German and Soviet troops...

...One wishes Eksteins had tapped more deeply into this region of the Latvian memory...

...History is and will continue to be what strong nations do, and what weak ones have done to them...

...The author's father, Rudolfs Eksteins, was a prime candidate for extinction—he had fought against the Bolsheviks in 1919, and had since become a Baptist minister—but somehow the authorities overlooked him...

...After a year of Bolshevik terror, German rule appeared like the return of sweetness and light...

...Eksteins states forthrightly, as Balts are often unwilling to do, that there were Latvians who eagerly joined the Nazis in their most cherished enterprise, which was killing Jews...

...Determined to puncture the Anglo-American smugness about their good war, Eksteins sometimes uses a blunt instrument where a sharp one is called for...

...The Germans supplied the noblemen, and the Kurlanders, as the Latvians were called, constituted the peasantry...

...Meanwhile, anti-Bolshevik forces massed for action...

...Negotiations restored Riga to the Latvians, but it was not long before a White Russian force, in fact made up largely of German Freikorps troops defying orders from Berlin, attacked Riga as part of a plan to reclaim the Russian empire...

...But the differences are clear and morally overwhelming...

...Just be sure to allow six weeks for your change to take effect...

...Nineteen forty-five is not our victory, as we often like to think...

...It was Hitler, of course, who pronounced the scourge of civilization to be JewBolshevism, and so it might seem obscene to give the connection any credence...

...The World War II generation taught me," and he now finds their teaching ridiculous...

...and only the great democracies could have taken those measures...