I walk out of the hotel, turn right, and head down the cobbled Riga street still drenched in lamplight. I see a familiar form waving at me from beside the white van that carries volunteers and bones back and forth across the Latvian landscape.
Over muddy fields and highways, this trusty van travels endlessly, ferrying the living toward the dead.
I smile and wave back. What we are about to do is my favorite thing in the world, and I’m doing it with some of my favorite people in the world: the tight-knit community of volunteers that forms Legenda.
I climb into the front seat and say a warm, excited hello to the men in the van. It’s a grand ol’ reunion. I haven’t seen these guys in months.
I’m sitting next to Talis, the leader of the gang. He’s been seeking the lost soldiers of Latvia for decades, working closely with the Latvian War Graves Commission, the Latvian government (which gives him the necessary permits), the landowners (who give him permission to dig on their property), and the current governments of the fallen soldiers. Talis often reaches into his own pocket to pay for the equipment and fees necessary to exhume and bury the lost soldiers with a proper military service in a proper military cemetery.
Duksi is second in command and, like all the diggers, possesses a huge amount of knowledge about the war and its soldiers, equipment, battles, and politics. I constantly besiege him with questions, and he always provides the answers.
I love this ragtag gang of diggers like brothers.
The digging community of Legenda is straightforward, no bullshit, get out there and dig and help each other as you go along, then eat and drink together all evening, then start again.
After a cheerful round of catching up, the guys fill me in.
On this exact day — December 30 — in 1944, a harsh battle raged between the Red Army and the Germans, with Latvians fighting each other on both sides. On the field where we will go with our shovels, around two thousand Latvian men who served in the Red Army died.
They rested in peace for months in piles stacked around the battlefield. The German Army had gathered up their war dead, but the Red Army had not. When the springtime thaw came, the women came to identify the bodies of their sons, fathers, brothers, and husbands. The bodies they identified were taken home and buried. Those not identified were hastily buried in unmarked mass graves.
Today we will look for those soldiers.
Where we dig today is a perfect illustration of the complexities that surround Latvia’s involvement in the war.
The Soviets occupied the country in 1940. The Latvians were subjected to massive oppression, including executions and deportation to Siberia en masse. Because of this, when the Germans rolled over the borders in 1941, the Latvians viewed them as liberators. A rather complex scenario unfolded over the next few years.
There were, and still are, mixed feelings about those war years in this country tucked so far into northeastern Europe. No one true Latvian path existed back then.
Jewish Latvians were forced to march to their deaths along the old highway, into a forest where executioners waited with guns.
Some Latvians pulled the triggers that sent their Jewish countrymen tumbling into mass graves.
Some Latvians were forced into the ranks of the German army as members of the SS Latvian Legion.
Some signed up willingly and proudly wore its death’s head insignia.
Many died in the name of Communism, some forced to fight for the Red Army and a regime they did not believe in.
Others fought proudly for the Red Army and carried their victory into the next iteration of Latvian history.
All were affected — and all lives were sent further into terror and disarray.
Although the Latvians perceived the Germans as their liberators initially, by the time of the formation of the Legion, their opinions of the Germans had dulled significantly.
The SS Latvian Legion was not tried or convicted of crimes against humanity in the Nuremberg trials, due to the conclusion by the Allied powers that they were forced into conscription. As a whole, they were trusted by the Allies, noted for their difference in ideology and purpose from the Nazis or the SS. Some historians say that, at the time, they were considered freedom fighters (against Communism), and not fascists.
During the war they were a front line combat unit. After the war, they served as guards beside the Americans; their duty was patrolling the area surrounding the cells of war criminals like Goering and Hess during the Nuremberg trials. They also worked with the Americans on their bases throughout Europe in the years following the war.
While it is true that some of the men who participated in the massacres of the Jews eventually served in the Legion, the massacres were not committed by the Legion itself. They occurred in the year before the formation of the Legion.
The sun is still rising at 9 am, and sits behind a thick layer of clouds. We set up base camp. One by one the men march off, shovels and metal detectors over their shoulders. Hats on, smokes out. Ready for a long day, and filled with high hopes to find a soldier who can finally be sent home.
A whip of the wind bites at my face, which is the only exposed skin on my body. I wear a pair of heavy synthetic leather gloves I bought yesterday at a Latvian version of Home Depot. Occasionally, I allow my right hand to break free so I can take photos, but skin freezes quickly in these conditions. Taking to heart the words of warning about frostbite, I mostly keep it in its heavily cushioned glove.
Every time Talis sees me, he calls me over. “America!”, as he has nicknamed me, in a thick accent. “Amer-ee-kuh!” He pulls off my gloves, checks my hands to make sure they are warm enough, then slides my gloves back on.
Mud everywhere. The sound of the tractor groaning. Men, roaming in the field and in the clusters of trees dotting the landscape here and there, their location given away by the beeps of metal detectors.
The soldiers wore various types of metal on their uniforms and carried metal items in their gear; the beep of the detector gives a clue that there could be a soldier lying under the sweep of the detector.
Under a dull and dense sky, the earth churns forth the evidence of war. Bullet casings. Cartridges stuffed full of glistening gunpowder. Helmets. Communication wire. Shrapnel-shredded meal tins. Artillery. Grenades. Pieces of a gun. A tiny gold star from a Red Army officer’s shoulder boards.
All items that have been buried for seven decades. Decaying in the earth. Quietly holding a story of humanity’s inhumanities.
Each item is both a witness to life and a watcher of death … and man’s need for domination.
Removing any items from a digging site in which a soldier has been found, or from the soldier himself, is considered grave robbing, which is strictly forbidden and results in severe consequences. This is solidly upheld, a foundational sacrament of Legenda, with zero tolerance toward anyone who falls out of line.
I wander off from the group and venture into a petite, narrow forest. Fallen trees. Moss. A huge puddle of water. Brambles and branches everywhere. I lean over, hunch down, and take photos of the marks made by bugs eating the curling tree bark, which is peeled off in wide swaths and undulating across the ground in every direction.
I think of the men.
The men who were sponges for propaganda from tyrannical governments, and held their fight with fervor. The men who were fatigued by the oppression and craved a simple kind of peace. The men who didn’t want to be there, dying for something they didn’t believe in. All of them, guns in hand, mutually existing as killers on the front lines, hell-bent on surviving this damn war.
I think of them as fathers. As lovers. As shopkeepers or scholars. Men who may not have even had two decades under their belts.
I think of the fluid, invisible line undulating on the battlefield between them, every effort made to completely annihilate one another.
I think of the women.
Their vulnerability without the men to protect them. The things they endured. The decisions they had to make. Their worries about feeding their families under wretched occupation by two consecutive armies doling out brutality and vengeance on repeat. I think of them waiting.
Waiting.
Waiting for her man to return. In one piece. Wondering if he’s been harmed. Does he have enough to eat? Is he warm at night? Does he miss the way my fingertips trail across his chest as he drifts off to sleep? Why hasn’t he written? Has he been killed?
Waiting.
The women combed this field in the spring of 1945, looking for the bodies of their men among the piles of rotting bodies the Red Army left behind. Were tears spilling out of their eyes, or had they run out of tears? What about the woman who didn’t find her man? What did she do when he never came home?
War sucks.
For everyone.
Duksi tells me about a Red Army soldier they dug up from this same field a while back. They had found a medal from his uniform with a registration number on it, so the guys were able to work in conjunction with the Russians to trace his identity.
The Russian government found his daughter, still alive, in Russia.
She remembers being a young girl and sitting on her father’s lap the day he went off to war. Then nothing, for many years, until these diggers, with their crusty metal detectors, set out across the field to bring him home to his daughter.
She watched him leave, and he didn’t come back.
She was able to bury him when he came back seven decades later. Duksi often feigns that he can’t speak English, but what he says next proves him wrong.
“You are not like other people, Erin. I can see it in your face. The way you look at the battlefield. You don’t just stand here today, right now, and look at what there is to see. You feel the history.”
Here, he gesticulates with his big hands and makes the sounds of anguish, artillery, and explosions, with shooting guns as extra effect. Then he stops, looks at me, and says, “You experience it like it was happening here, right now.”
“Yes,” I say. “That is all true.”
·
We dig for hours.
To think of the thousands of men still lying under our feet, waiting to be exhumed and returned home if they can be identified, is mind-boggling. A sense of awe rushes through me. I am blessed to be included in this quest and honored to gather the bones when they reveal themselves.
With every shovelful of dirt, there is always the hope of finding a soldier.
There were no bones, no soldiers, found today.
The sky begins to darken as the sun slides down rapidly. The tractor turns back, and so do the men with their gear.
The Latvian sun is straight ahead — just above the horizon, still hidden but trying to peek through the clouds.
“Amer-ee-kuh!”
It’s Talis, the boss, waving for me to follow him. He wants me to walk back with him to pick up some gear. I follow him and watch my feet muck through the mud, feeling it pull heavily on my heels. There’s a cob of rotten corn, a delicate skeleton snapped in half by the heavy footfall of one of the guys. I hear the tractor behind me, finding its way to base camp.
Talis is gesturing again, telling me in a mixture of Latvian and German about a gnarled piece of machinery they pulled out of the earth. I’m smiling, nodding, interested. He soon walks away, satisfied that he has — somewhat — shared his knowledge with me.
Then I am alone on this vast field.
The sun breaks through the clouds, joining me and the still-hidden soldiers on the battlefield. Quite suddenly there are streams of the brightest light beaming every which way.
I pick up the gear and walk back to meet the guys, soaking up the presence of beauty spilling out of history’s ugliness.
·
Somehow, when you find a piece of a fallen soldier, you find a piece of yourself, as if a part of you, too, was hastily buried in an unmarked battlefield grave.
When you gather up the bones nestled in the earth, it’s like something clicks inside you, puts you back together. Like a visceral, palpable synergy between you and the bones you hold in your hands, forming a pure connection. Purer than pure.
It changes you, inside and out.
Makes you feel yourself in ways you can’t describe.
You feel the wide-open spaces of humanity, with all of its inhumanity, in ways you can’t believe.
A sacred union between you and the remains of this human that has no words and remains a secret between you for all of time.
You long to share it, to tell it, to describe it, but you can’t.
So you just return again and again, to gather the bones.
·
There are still a hundred thousand missing soldiers in Latvia. The men and women of Legenda will continue their mission until all the soldiers are found.