Hundreds remember the Rumbula thousands

What began as a small-scale commemoration led by Lolita Tomsone of the Janis Lipke museum in Riga and historian Kaspars Zellis soon turned into a remarkable event with large numbers of people showing up to place a candle and show they remembered their compatriots, slaughtered for no other crime than their ethnicity.

The presence of local collaborators helping the Nazi death squads has made discussion of those events in 1941 uncomfortable for many years.

But on the night of November 30, 2016 Latvians confronted their history square-on and signaled their sense of loss and of love for their Jewish fellow citizens.

Social media was flooded with pictures of the commemoration, some of which are reproduced below.