She says they found false teeth frozen into a glass beside one of beds and a dead baby in the toilet. There was evidence of the previous Latvian inhabitants, although the Austrian Jews were not aware of the Latvians' fate. She describes the horrible conditions that awaited them when they reached Riga and the house where they all spent the night. Lanzmann asks her whether her family was self-consciously Jewish. She says that she remembers when the German army came into Vienna. She says the SS men seemed like gods to her. She describes their arrival in the ghetto and says it was extremely cold.ĬR 7: 02:11:26 Schneider talks further about her impression of Lange and Maywald, whom she describes as Lange's sidekick. Schneider and her immediate family chose to walk and she found out much later that the buses were gas vans. Approximately 700 people chose the buses and 300 chose to walk. She says that Lange was one of the two German SS men who greeted the transport and offered them the option of walking the 8 km to Riga or taking a bus. Schneider waited until everyone fell asleep and then ate half the marzipan.įILM ID 3222 - Camera Rolls #6,7,8,9 - 02:00:00 to 02:33:47ĬR 6: Schneider finishes the story about the marzipan, then describes their arrival in Riga. She says that her mother brought along marzipan in her suitcase that she intended to save until they got to the ghetto. She talks about passing through Krakow and seeing Jews working on the railroad. She says that Alois Brunner traveled with their transport and shot Sigmund Bosel on the steps of their train car. The car was so warm that she washed her hair using warm water from the radiator. She describes the four day train journey to Riga. They were told that they were being sent east but they did not know more than that, until someone mentioned Riga. Brunner tore up her father's identification card, which indicated that he was a "Wirtschafts-Wichtiger Jude". She begins to describe her family's deportation from Vienna on February 1, 1942.ĬR 5: 01:15:37 Schneider describes being taken with her family and all the Jews in her street to a school, where they encountered Anton Brunner. She describes the separation of the two parts of the ghetto. She says that there are still Latvian Jews who blame the German Jews for the deaths of their families, but that nonetheless the remaining Latvian Jews behaved wonderfully to the Germans. She explains that Lange carried out the killings in a very haphazard fashion, that in fact it did not make sense to kill skilled workers to replace them with the predominantly middle-class German Jews. Video drops out.ĬR 4: 01:04:19 Lanzmann asks Schneider to return to the subject of whether Latvian Jews had actually been killed to make room for the German Jews. She says that in the course of research for her book she discovered that the widely held notion that the Latvian Jews had been killed to make room for the German Jews was incorrect, although this impression was fostered by the SS personnel in the ghetto. Lanzmann asks her why she wrote her book about the Riga ghetto. Gertrude Schneider is shown sitting on her couch. At Lanzmann's urging, the women sing several Yiddish songs they learned in the ghetto.įILM ID 3221 - Camera Rolls #3,4,5 - 01:01:00 to 01:26:41ĬR 3: A few seconds of a street scene in New York, then Dr. The interview, which also includes Schneider's mother and sister, covers topics such as the perception of Viennese Jews by Latvian Jews, sex and pregnancy in the ghetto, and the Madeportation Aktion. Gertrude Schneider was a Viennese Jew deported with her family to the Riga ghetto.
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