Bikernieki Forest

Bikernieki Forest.....located minutes from downtown Riga should be a great place for a peaceful stroll through a grove of old pine trees. Unfortunately, Bikernieki (beaker-nee-eck-ee) Forest is the  biggest mass murder site in all of Latvia during the Holocaust of World War II.  And now the forest is a grim reminder of those sad days.  Elder & Sister Davis drove there one day with  Sister Boswell, and Elder & Sister Perry to see the memorial and walk around the grave sites.

This canopy entrance is the first thing you see from the main road and the second thing are two granite markers to the left of it.  It is interesting to note that this memorial was funded by the German Government...

No one knows the exact number of people murdered here because, as the war was ending and the Germans were retreating, they wanted to hide the evidence of what they had done in this forest. So they dug up the graves, burned the bodies and used a machine to chop up the bones. There are estimated to have been 30,000- 40,000 killed here but they only found 20,000 bodies when the area was dug through after the war. 

There were some witnesses to what happened here. People actually lived nearby and knew about the killings.  Why the Nazi's wouldn't think that people would talk it, shows how out of touch with reality they were.

After walking a quarter of a mile up the marked path, we saw the first area of mass grave sites. The architect of the memorial is Sergey Rizh, a Russian who spent 15 years working on the design.  This memorial wasn't completed until Nov. 30, 2001.

There are 4,000 granite stones marking an area 13x13 feet.  It reminds you of a cemetery... only the headstones are jagged. 

The first victims were several thousand Jewish men arrested in the first weeks of July, 1941 who were kept in the Central Prison and later brought to Biķernieki Forest to be shot. 

 In 1943, Riga Ghetto prisoners who were not transferred to the “Kaizerwald” (Salaspils) concentration camp were killed here, followed in the autumn of 1944 by prisoners no longer able to work.

There are stones in the ground scattered all over the memorail that are engraved with the names of the home towns of the victims known buried here.

At every holocaust site we have visited, we notice tall, jagged stones everywhere and we finally researched why those are so common in Jewish cemeteries. This tradition began long ago, when the dead were not placed in caskets, but rather the body was wrapped in a burial shroud, placed in the ground, and covered with dirt. The large stones placed on top the grave, prevented wild animals from digging up the remains. Now, the custom of leaving a small stone on a grave has become common place at Jewish grave sites.   It is their way of saying, "I remember you."   They are called "visitation stones".

You walk softly on paths strewn with fallen leaves and speak to each other in hushed tones, it just seems fitting.

The sadness we feel is tangible...and E/S Davis have had other people say, "We have no interest in seeing sites like those." But every time we visit a holocaust site we are determined to share it with others....how can we keep mankind from repeating these horrific events if we don't remind people what has happened in the past?

Grave site after grave site.... we didn't get to see them all.

There are no guides or docents to tell you anything about this memorial. In fact the whole place has a neglected feel to it. But we will never forget this place or the people who lay beneath it.