Kumerow Friedrich

Kumerow, Friedrich Friedrich Kumerow (b. 1904) a Baltic German, was a resident of Rīga married to a Jewish woman, Zenja Samberg, and the father of two sons. Following the German occupation of Latvia, his wife was allowed to remain outside the ghetto, but her Jewish relatives, in Rīga and in Liepāja, were interned in ghettos, where most of them later perished. In October 1943, after the liquidation of the ghetto in Liepāja, several dozen Jews were brought to Rīga, among them Rosa Nieburg and her five-year-old daughter Aviva (later Braver). Rosa’s husband, who perished in Liepāja on June 30, 1941, had been Zenja’s classmate in the 1920s. Thanks to the efforts of a mutual friend, who connected Rosa with the Kumerows, Aviva was smuggled out of the ghetto to the Aryan side of the city and handed over to Kumerow on November 6, 1943. The child was hidden in the Kumerows’ apartment for a year, and none of the neighbors knew of her existence. Throughout the whole time of her stay with the Kumerow family, little Aviva was given loving care and never felt like a stranger. On October 13, 1944, Rīga was liberated but no member of Aviva’s family came to claim her. She remained with her rescuers one more year, until her mother returned from a concentration camp in Germany. The two stayed with the Kumerows until they immigrated to Israel in 1966. On January 7, 1981, Yad Vashem recognized Friedrich Kumerow as Righteous Among the Nations.