Zaltsman Evgeny (1925)

Zaltsman (Salzmann) Evgeny (Shneer) Zaltsman (b. 1925, Mitava [Jelgava], Latvia) — psychiatrist, scholar, survivor of the ghetto and Nazi concentration camps, memoirist.

Evgeny Zaltsman studied at the Jewish school in Jelgava, where instruction was mainly in Latvian, but German and Hebrew were also taught. He was a member of the youth organisation Betar. On 29 June 1941, Zaltsman and his family managed with difficulty to reach Riga, where they, together with the Riga Jews, became prisoners of the ghetto. His mother, sister and brother were murdered at Rumbula; only Evgeny and his father survived. In 1942 he was deported to the Kaiserwald concentration camp, and on 11 October 1944, just two days before the liberation of Riga, he was transported by the last ship to the Stutthof concentration camp. In December 1944 the prisoners were forced on a death march to Burggraben (a subcamp of Stutthof) and further westwards. On 10 March 1945 the surviving prisoners were liberated by the Soviet army.

Immediately after liberation, despite his extreme exhaustion, Evgeny Zaltsman was conscripted into the Soviet army, where he encountered antisemitism. He crossed into the Western zone with the aim of emigrating to Palestine. In 1947 he was arrested and sentenced by a military tribunal to ten years in the GULAG. Released in 1954, he was forbidden to reside in Riga.

In 1958, despite many obstacles, he was admitted to the Riga Medical Institute. He worked nights at the Jelgava Psychiatric Hospital and attended lectures in Riga during the day. In 1964 he received his medical degree as a psychiatrist and continued working in Jelgava, first as head of the out-patient department and later as deputy chief physician for medical affairs.

In 1973 he defended his dissertation at the Moscow Research Institute of Psychiatry on “A study of certain aspects of protein metabolism in different types of schizophrenia in children”, earning the degree of Candidate of Medical Sciences.

In 1981 he moved to Riga, where he headed the Republican Children’s Psychoneurological Dispensary. From 1981 to 1996 he served as Chief Child Psychiatrist of Latvia.

He gave papers at international congresses in Budapest and Hamburg and lectured in clinics in Berlin, Hamburg, Essen and Düsseldorf. In 1985 he was awarded two honorary certificates, one by the Latvian SSR Minister of Health and the other by the Latvian SSR Minister of Education.

In 1990, in cooperation with psychiatrists from the United States, he laid the foundations for Paralympic sport in Latvia. In 1994 he was elected Corresponding Member of the Moscow Psychotherapeutic Academy. In 1995 he established links with the Swedish Centre for Child Psychiatry, which gave considerable support to the development of child psychiatry in Latvia.

Between 1990 and 1992 Evgeny Zaltsman met with many Holocaust survivors, received medical supplies from foreign sponsors and distributed them among former ghetto prisoners.

In 1995 his autobiographical book This Bitter Happiness was published in Riga — both a document of the era and a work of literary value.

In 1996 Evgeny Zaltsman emigrated to Israel. In 1999 he gave a lecture at the Centre for the Study of Antisemitism at the Technical University of Berlin. In 2002 he was elected an honorary member of the German Society for Child and Adolescent Psychiatry.

Publications:

Evgeny Zaltsman. Eto gorkoe schast’e [This Bitter Happiness]. Riga, 1995.

Literature:

Evrei-mediki Latvii [Jewish Physicians of Latvia], ed. Eva Vater. Riga, 1997, p. 164.