Day of Remembrance of the Genocide of the Jewish People during the Second World War (04/07)

July 4 — is a mournful and memorable day in the history of the Jewish people — is the Day of Remembrance of the Genocide of the Jewish People during the Second World War.

On this day, in 1941, a few days after German troops entered Riga, eight synagogues were burned in the Latvian capital along with thousands of Jews. This day went down in history as «crystal night».

For the first time, «Kristallnacht» — night of broken windows — was organized by the Nazis in Germany on November 9, 1938. In the wave of Jewish pogroms that swept across the country, hundreds of Jews were killed, all synagogues in Germany were destroyed, and more than seven thousand Jewish shops were looted. After this, more than thirty thousand Jews were thrown into concentration camps.

In Riga on this day, the «security team», pouring gasoline on pre-prepared tow and the walls of the synagogue, calmly set fire to the building. The main synagogue of Latvia — The large choral synagogue — was destroyed along with the believers there. There were five hundred believers...

The action was carried out by a team led by Victor Arais. The so-called «security team» was organized with the arrival of the Nazis in Riga on July 1, 1941. Volunteers — mainly enrolled in it, high school students and students of the University of Latvia. One of these — Victor Arais — is a 31-year-old young and handsome intellectual who received a Soviet law degree a year earlier. But nothing goes unpunished. On July 10, 1975, 34 years after the crimes were committed, the German authorities found Victor Arais, who at that time worked as a typesetter in a printing house in Frankfurt am Main.

The number of those killed by this «-plowman» (the surname Arais is translated from Latvian as «-plowman») and his henchmen amounted to hundreds of thousands, but at the trial he only regretted that it was not possible to shoot everyone who remained living witnesses. He was sentenced to — life imprisonment. In January 1988, at the age of 78, former executioner Victor Arais died in Kassau prison.

Today's day of remembrance is an occasion to remember the victims of that time who were subjected to violence and racial discrimination. So that the tragedy does not happen again...

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