DIE PRÄSIDENTEN |
- a film about Steven Springfield |
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| Alexander Bergmann |
Steven Springfield |
LEGU | Jewish Survivors of Latvia |
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ALEXANDER BERGMANN - brief biography: |
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Riga, the capital of Latvia, a flourishing Hanseatic port, celebrates its 800th anniversary. The old town shines in renewed glory. The art nouveau quarter, with its surviving buildings from the turn of the century, is one of Europe's most beautiful examples of its kind. Riga also stands for deportations to the East during German National Socialism. As the German army marched into Riga on July 1st, 1941, a flourishing Jewish community was destroyed. Riga's former ghetto is still almost completely intact and is now known as the "Moscow suburb". The film's protagonist, Dr. Alexander Bergmann, one of the few Holocaust survivors in Latvia, lives very close by. The son of a teacher, Alexander Bergmann grew up in Riga in the thirties and went to a German school. At the age of 16, he was forced to move to the Riga ghetto with his family. Except for his elder brother, who now lives in Münster/Germany, his entire family was murdered. |
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Alexander Bergmann survived the concentration camps in Kaiserwald and Stutthof, until he was finally liberated in Magdeburg, in one of Buchenwald's external camps in 1945. In September 1945, he returned to Riga dressed in a German hunter's jacket, ladies' stockings and worn out shoes, in search of his family - and found an uncle. Today, he has been a lawyer for almost 50 years and still continues to work. He has been a widower since 1986. Alexander Bergmann has been President of the former prisoners of the Jewish ghetto and concentration camps in Latvia (LEGU) since 1993. Many times Alexander Bergmann traveled to Germany and held speeches in schools, churches and even in the German parliament Bundestag. You may read his speech on the German Holocaust-day on January 27th 1997: Die vergessenen Juden in Riga - Zur Situation der baltischen Holocaust-Überlebenden. About his long struggle for compensation for East-European Holocaust-Survivors there were many newspaper articles and most important: He was featured in the German TV magazin PANORAMA: Steuermilliarden für Naziverbrecher - Deutsches Recht macht Täter zu Opfern
contact to Alexander Bergmann: |
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You can write an email (in Russian, Latvian, German or in English) here, |
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Film: Die Präsidenten |
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