The Old Jewish Cemetery

The Jewish cemetery in Riga was almost 250 years old when the Communists removed the graves in the 1960s to make way for the Park of the Communist Brigades. By that time, most of the tombstones had already been stolen and used as building materials. But the greatest tragedy had taken place two decades previously, in 1941, when the Nazis made the bodies of over a thousand murdered Jews disappear in mass graves. When the camera goes in search of the old cemetery of the title and ends up in the park, this brings about the realization that the memory of these victims, as well as those who were buried there before, has been taken away. But Sergei Loznitsa’s camera restores the memory of this place. He shows us the cemetery by showing its absence, paying quiet homage to the women, men and children who once rested there. In the words of director Claude Lanzmann, “The proof is not the corpses, the proof is the absence of corpses.”