This country has my heart in a way that is difficult to explain and impossible to forget.
I have traveled to Latvia twice to recover soldiers killed and missing in action from both world wars, and to try to understand a history that is layered, complicated, and rarely told accurately outside its borders. On this particular day
I am with my friend Andris, who is showing me the massacre sites surrounding Riga: the execution pits where Jewish men, women, and children were marched from the ghetto and shot during the German occupation. We also visit Salaspils, which changed hands during the war and served at different points as both a concentration camp and a prisoner of war camp.
It was the coldest I have ever been. Andris and I stopped constantly for hot drinks and the cold was almost unbearable.
At some point Andris mentioned that our visit was falling near the anniversary of the roundups, and that the Jews had been marched from the ghetto to these pits in temperatures like these, which are normal temperatures for December in Latvia.
I shivered in a way that had nothing to do with the cold.
He told me that the entire forest surrounding Riga is a graveyard. Standing in those trees, I believed him completely.