Frida Michelson (1905–1982)

Frida Michelson (in Latvian Mihelsone) was born to a Jewish family in Jaungulbene, Latvia, and grew up in Varakļāni. She moved to Riga in the 1930s to work as a seamstress and dressmaker. During the Nazi Occupation of her country in World War II, she was forced into the Riga Ghetto. In two days at the end of November and early December 1941, more than 30,000 Jews were taken to the Rumbula forest on the outskirts of Riga and murdered by machine gun. Frida was a witness to the first day, November 30, when she saw thousands of fellow Jews removed from the ghetto. On December 8, she herself was removed from the ghetto and forced to march with others to Rumbula. She escaped being killed by throwing herself into the snow when approaching the site of the massacre and pretending to be dead. She hid in the forest for the next three years, and survived with the help of local people. After the war, she married Mordehajs Michelsons, with whom she had two children. In 1950, her husband was deported to Siberia. In 1971, Frida and her children were allowed to move to Israel. In the 1960s, she wrote a memoir of the Holocaust and the Nazi Occupation of Latvia in Yiddish, her native language. The manuscript was translated by Latvian-born writer and Jewish activist David Silberman. It was first published in book form in 1973, and issued in English as I Survived Rumbuli. At age 72, despite a heart ailment, Mrs. Michelson traveled to New York City from her home in Haifa for a hearing with the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service, at which she confronted a former Latvian policeman whom she identified as aiding the Nazi executioners in 1941.