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Books Latvia's Jewish Community: History, Tragedy, Revival | ||
Marģers Vestermanis (born 18 September 1925 in Riga, Latvia) is a Latvian Holocaust survivor, historian, founder and former director of the museum "Jews in Latvia".
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Youth and World War II
Marģers Vestermanis was born into a Jewish, German-speaking family as the youngest of three sons of a merchant and manufacturer. He attended a German school in his hometown and was later a student of the private Jewish Esra school. Furthermore, Vestermanis received religious education from a rabbi at the age of 6 until he turned 15. Upon the arrival of the Wehrmacht, he was taken to the Riga Ghetto at the age of 16. Subsequently he was interned in the Kaiserwald concentration camp. He was subjected to forced labor at the SS-Truppenübungsplatz Seelager and the neighboring camps Poperwahlen and Dondangen. On a death march, he was able to escape into the woods, where he later joined the resistance movement. Vestermanis was the only one of his family to survive the Holocaust.