Family history leads to ‘Echo’ of the Holocaust

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Latvian Holocaust survivor Sia Hertsberg of Glenview will speak at the screening of “Rumbula’s Echo.”

A work-in-progress screening of “Rumbula’s Echo” will be presented at 11 a.m. Jan. 29 in the Highland Park Theatre, 445 Central Ave., Highland Park. Admittance is by advance-ticket only, available at highlandparkmovies.com or by calling (312) 488-4683. Admission is free but donations are accepted.

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Updated: January 24, 2012 9:13PM

Thirteen years ago, Mitchell Leiber decided to investigate his family history in honor of his daughter’s naming day. He had no idea he would wind up directing a documentary about one of the most brutal atrocities of the Holocaust.

After presentations in Latvia, New York City and Washington D.C., a work-in-progress screening of “Rumbula’s Echo,” which views the extermination of 98 percent of Latvia’s Jewish population through the lens of Lieber’s genealogical research, will be held Jan. 29 in the Highland Park Theatre.

Sia Hertsberg of Glenview, a survivor of the Latvian Holocaust who appears in the film, will be present for a post-screening discussion with Lieber and Dr. Elliot Lefkovitz of the Spertus Institute.

Lieber, who grew up in Wilmette, began researching his genealogy after deciding to name his daughter after his great-grandmother Chana Beiler Liber. He knew only that she had been the wife of a rabbi who assisted women in their prayers, in a part of Russia that later became Latvia.

Chana Beiler Liber’s son, David, Mitchell’s grandfather, had emigrated to America in 1911, where Mitchell’s father Herbert was born. But the majority of the family that remained in the old country was decimated during the Holocaust, principally during a two-day mass shooting of 25,000 men, women and children on Nov. 30 and Dec. 8, 1941.

Mass murder

The massacre that took place in Latvia’s Rumbula Forest is one of the largest single-day mass murders perpetrated by the Nazis before the operation of the death camps, second only to the better-known execution of 33,771 Jews at Babi Yar in the Ukraine. Both of mass murders were organized and overseen by SS officer Friedrich Jeckeln, a former engineer who invented the mass-killing technique he called “sardine packing,” which involved marching victims into a mass grave and shooting them, one row on top of another.

“The mass murders in Rumbula Forest are relatively unknown and overlooked,” said Lieber. “If you’re a Jew from Latvia, you know about it, or if you’re one of the Holocaust cognoscenti. Most people, if they know anything about the history of the Holocaust, have heard about Babi Yar — but not Rumbula.”

The more that Lieber looked into the history of this family in Latvia, the more he learned about the history of the Holocaust there. In 2002, several years after beginning his research, he launched the now-extensive website, rumbula.org, to share the information he had discovered.

Around 2004, while adding to the site, he came across an article written by a historian who noted that while there were several films about the atrocities at Babi Yar (including a documentary produced by Steven Spielberg), none had been made about the mass murders at Rumbula Forest.

Lieber, who had produced more than a hundred documentaries earlier in his career as public affairs director at WNIB-FM, decided to be the one to do it: “I had written most of my career, I had done documentaries on radio, I was familiar with the history and the key players of the time, and I had an interesting personal family story to wrap it up in.”

After taking filmmaking classes, he spent the next five or six years raising funds, assembling archival content, shooting footage in Latvia and developing a script, that includes the stories of survivors, perpetrators such as Jeckeln, collaborators, resisters and rescuers, including a dock worker who smuggled 55 Jews out of the Riga Ghetto into hiding.

He also traveled wherever he could find survivors and witnesses to interview for the film. The youngest of the survivors in the film, Lieber noted, is 80. The oldest, at 92, passed away last year. He managed to speak to one survivor in Paris only a week before he died.

“These are people who are eye-witnesses to history,” Lieber said. “We have to make the most of this opportunity to record their stories.”

Surviving

Sia Hertsberg was 14 at the time of the Rumbula shootings. She only avoided death there when a school friend who had joined the police distracted an officer who had attempted to rape her in Riga Ghetto — and warned her mother not to join the march leaving the ghetto that night.

There were more hardships to come, including incarceration in two Nazi camps and a death march that claimed the lives of her mother and sister. But Hertsberg survived, married, had two children in Iron Curtain Latvia after the war, and eventually emigrated to America in 1974 — where she made her home in Glenview.

She didn’t know Lieber, though, until they met at a reunion of Latvian survivors in Israel five years ago. And she couldn’t be more pleased with his work.

“It’s a wonderful film,” she said. “After I saw it the first time, I was speechless. I hope it will be seen by many people because it tells the story so well. I know, because I saw what happened there with my own eyes.”