Lieludre Marta

Lieludre, Marta Before the Second World War, Marta Lieludre, in her forties, was the wealthy owner of a large farm in Taurkalnes County (today Valle, Bauskas District). During the 1930s, when she brought wheat to the flourmill in the region of Jaunjelgavas, the closest city, she met Solomon, the son of Tsalel Vesterman, the mill owner, who was a Jew, and she became friendly with the elder Vesterman. Solomon married and moved to Riga. There, two daughters were born to the couple. With the German conquest of Latvia, Solomon Vesterman was one of the few who survived the killing operations of the Germans and their Latvian collaborators. Most of Latvia’s Jews were murdered in the first months of the occupation. His wife and two daughters were murdered in the massacre perpetrated in Bikernieki Forest, near Riga. Solomon Vesterman was incarcerated in the Riga ghetto and made to do forced labor for the Germans. He was nonetheless a member of an underground group, which operated in the ghetto. At the outset of the final liquidation of the ghetto and the pursuit of the members of the underground in 1943, Vesterman managed to escape and board a moving freight train, by means of which he reached the farm of his prewar acquaintance, Marta Lieludre. She did not let him down, sheltering him on the farm in the guise of a relative who was helping her with the chores. He remained there until the spring of 1944. During that period, German officers from a combat unit took up residence on the farm, endangering both Solomon and his rescuer. One of the officers warned Marta that “the person” on the farm was liable to be caught and should be hidden “deeper.” Marta decided to move Solomon to a dugout, which she had prepared in the forest, about a kilometer from the farm. Edvin Celmins, a young relative of Marta, brought food and various tools to Solomon and to Boris, a Soviet POW who had escaped from the Germans and whom Marta was also sheltering in the forest. She continued to helpthem until the Red Army liberated the area in the summer of 1944. After the war, Solomon Vesterman was able to repay his rescuer’s kindness. Having been part of an anti-Nazi underground group, the Soviet authorities esteemed him, and this made it possible for him to come to her aid during the period of Communist control. As a rich property owner who had also supported a Latvian nationalist organization of landowners – an organization that was liquidated by the Soviets in the summer of 1940 – Marta Lieludre was considered an enemy of the regime. It was Solomon Vesterman’s testimony on her behalf that apparently kept her from being exiled to Siberia. Solomon, together with the new family he established after the war, remained friendly with Marta Lieludre until his death in 1966. On July 17, 2005, Yad Vashem recognized Marta Lieludre as Righteous Among the Nations.