On Thursday, 30 July, Marģers (Meirs) Vestermanis (1925–2026), historian, member of the Latvian Academy of Sciences, recipient of the Order of the Three Stars and Honorary Doctor of History, passed away, according to information published on the Facebook page of the “Jews in Latvia” Museum. He was the museum’s founder and creator, as well as its long-serving director and curator.
As stated in the farewell tribute, after losing his entire family in the Holocaust, he made it his life’s mission to commemorate a world that had been destroyed and preserve the memory of its victims. Although, as a historian, he studied many different episodes in Latvia’s history, throughout his life he considered it important to speak about the Jews murdered during the Nazi occupation and the other victims of the regime. This seriously hindered his professional career: he was dismissed from his job at the archives for showing excessive interest in the terror directed against Jews. Nevertheless, this did not deter him from continuing to collect material persistently about the course of the Holocaust and the fates of its victims.
As representatives of the “Jews in Latvia” Museum recall, unable to work at academic and research institutions, he taught at various schools for 23 years, including the Emīls Dārziņš Secondary School of Music, where many of his pupils later became prominent figures in Latvian culture.
With the beginning of the Latvian National Awakening, he was able to return to research, and in late 1988 he laid the foundations for the “Jews in Latvia” Museum and Documentation Centre – the first institution of its kind in the history of Latvia’s Jewish community. At the same time, he began actively publishing articles in Latvia and abroad, both in academic journals and newspapers. In the 1990s, he began teaching the first courses on the history of the Holocaust at the University of Latvia. Many of his students from that period are now recognised and award-winning historians in Latvia, the museum notes.
From 1998, he was also a member of the Commission of Historians of Latvia. It was in this context that the final major theme of his research emerged – the rescue of Jews during the Holocaust.
As he himself said: “I was compelled to write by my Jewish gratitude towards those people who, during a time of apocalyptic horror, when the Jewish people had been condemned to death, risked their own lives and those of their loved ones to save even a single persecuted person.”
His gift to himself for his centenary celebrations was the book “Humanity Was Not Dead After All... The Rescue of Jews in Nazi-Occupied Latvia, 1941–1945”. Even after this magnum opus had been published and reached bookshops, he continued expanding it for a second edition, which he lived to see in print. In recent months, he had been working on foreign-language editions of the study – as recently as yesterday, he was editing the book’s German translation, representatives of the “Jews in Latvia” Museum note.
“Mr Vestermanis was not only a museum director, researcher and author; he was also a friend and a source of support. He had an immense interest in and curiosity about life, and regarded every moment as an opportunity to learn more about the world and to do something for its benefit. Every one of us who ever met him learned something from him,” the obituary states.
The date and time of the farewell ceremony and funeral will be announced separately.
