Latvian Notebook

Douglas Hurd

20 May 2009

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Douglas Hurd on his recent trip to Latvia

I meet the embassy staff, for example the consular officers. Riga has been a leading target of noisy British stag parties, but no longer. Credit has crunched; Ryanair has put up charges. There is only one British subject in prison in Riga today.

I go for a much-needed walk in brisk sunshine through the city to St Saviour’s Church, red Victorian brick opposite the quay where British ships once moored. The Rector holds C of E services every Sunday and helps to run an orphanage. Past the amazing façade of the Blackheads Hall, restored after the war in the original demented Hanseatic-Jacobean style. A tall Latvian girl takes me round the Museum of Occupation. She quietly explains 50 years of killing and deportation, from the annexation by Stalin in 1940, through Nazi occupation, back to Soviet rule in 1945. She shows the broken violin, the set of a child’s postcards, much else from the Gulag. Also photographs of human bodies slaughtered, exhumed, reburied as the tyrants changed.

The British Chamber of Commerce dinner is the occasion for my visit. About 100 present, funds collected for St Saviour’s, awards to students, a buzz of networking. Nothing remarkable about the event, let alone my speech. The drama lies in the life stories of those present. The Chairman, assured and quietly charming, remembers her father, who was deported as a young man to Nazi Germany, somehow escaped to Britain through Denmark, found a job in Birmingham and sent his daughter to the Cadbury School in Bournville, to which she is grateful. One day at school the conversation turned to uncles, aunts and cousins. She had none. They had all been shot or died in camps. Her story could have been matched by almost everyone in that hotel dining-room. This is the past from which the Latvians, a pleasant, intelligent, unmilitant people, are trying to protect their children. That is why Latvia joined the EU and Nato. I leave, hoping that fate, with a little help from allies and partners, will grant them that respite from history.