Kaufman Max (1897-1987)

Kaufman ( Kaufmann) Max (6 April 1897, Dvinsk – 22 June 1987) — ghetto inmate, memoirist.

Max Kaufman graduated from the gymnasium in Daugavpils. From the 1930s until the occupation of Latvia first by the Soviets and then by the Nazis, he was a successful businessman in Riga engaged in wholesale textile trade.

He became one of the few surviving witnesses of the burning of the synagogue at 63 Stabu Street in Riga, together with the people locked inside, on 4 July 1941. Together with his wife and 13-year-old son he was imprisoned in the Riga Ghetto. His wife perished during the second mass shooting in Rumbula, and his son was shot dead by a guard while working in the peat bogs of Sloka in May 1943.

In August 1944, along with the few remaining survivors, Kaufman was transferred to the Kaiserwald concentration camp, then transported to Buchenwald, and later forced on a death march to Sachsenhausen, from where he was liberated on 1 May 1945. After liberation, he was appointed head of the labour department of the Central Committee of Liberated Jews of Germany in Munich. Within this committee, on his initiative, a special group was established to track down war criminals involved in crimes against the Jews of Latvia.

He founded the first Association of Surviving Latvian Jews and in 1947 published in German the book Die Vernichtung der Juden Lettlands (The Destruction of the Jews of Latvia), containing a vast amount of detail about life in the ghetto and concentration camps. It became the first book about the tragedy of Latvian Jewry during the Holocaust, placing significant emphasis on the participation of the local population in the extermination.

In 1947 he emigrated to the United States, where he established a tailoring and dry-cleaning business in New York. He continued his work begun in Germany of searching for former Nazis; through his efforts, many were tracked down in South America. He organised a group of former inmates of the Riga Ghetto, which in the early 1950s became the foundation of the organisation Jewish Survivors of Latvia, of which Kaufman was the first president.

He maintained extensive correspondence with former ghetto inmates in Latvia and abroad, as well as with prominent political and public figures such as Harry Truman, Albert Einstein, Eleanor Roosevelt, Golda Meir, Abba Eban, Moshe Dayan, Teddy Kollek, among others. In 1968 he published The Last Road of Professor Simon Dubnow (New York). He also participated in preparing the monograph The Jews of Latvia, published in English in Israel in 1971. His book Die Vernichtung der Juden Lettlands was republished in Germany in 1999 and made available in English online in 2008.

Works:

Die Vernichtung der Juden Lettlands. Munich, 1947 (in German).

The Last Road of Professor Simon Dubnow. New York, 1968 (in English).