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“I will try again, to double the output from the workshops, to prove the benefit of the Jews and maybe thus I will save the ghetto… but if it doesn't succeed, I will open the gates of the ghetto and let all the Jews flee to wherever they choose and we will be the last to leave and will set the ghetto aflame from every side.”

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Testimony Excerpt from Sara Minzanska-Pruzan

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Testimony Excerpt from Sara Minzanska-Pruzan

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“We arrived at a fully set-up camp in Vaivara, Estonia. We spent only three days there. From among us, they selected 150 men and 50 women – the youngest and strongest. I was one of them. We were sent to Jõhvi, where we worked at the building site of a hospital for Germans. There were Poles and Russians there as well. We all worked together. I was put to work in an SS kitchen. Conditions at the camp were quite all right. Sufficient food was provided and accommodation conditions were tolerable. The camp was guarded by Estonians in German uniforms and they supervised us at work. Their attitude towards prisoners was not bad“

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The camp is not preserved today. The Nazi official, Schnabel, stood trial in 1968 and was sentenced to 16 years in prison. The following year, his sentence was reduced to 6 years. The Nazi official, Aumeier, was sentenced to death and was executed in 1947. Other officials were not tried.

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Layout of the Vaivara Concentration Camps.

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Each square is a different hut that the prisoners had to live in.

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As the Soviet Army pushed closer to Vaivara, the prisoners still alive at the camp were sent to other camps in Estonia. The death toll was over 1000. They went on a death march of three days. Many of the prisoners who were sent died due to the conditions they faced on their journey to the next camp.

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Vaivara consisted of mainly Jewish people from Latvia and Lithuanian ghettos do Vilma and Kongo. The population consisted of Jewish, Russian, Dutch, Estonian, Latvian, and Lithuanian people. There were around 20,000 people sent here. Vaivara was the largest Estonian camp. It was made to fully exploit the work capacity of the inmates. They were forced to do labor from morning to night, working on constructing railways, digging antitank ditches, turning large stones into gravel, and felling trees in swamps where their knees down were submerged in water for hours. After their labor, they were forced into small, thin, wooden huts. Each hut was divided into 5 sections with about 70-80 prisoners in each division. They slept on triple tiers and were susceptible to disease and lice, which killed them.

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Vaivara was mainly a transit and labor camp when it was first established in 1943 in Northeast Estonia. It was a labor and transit camp. There were no large murders until after the Nazi’s decided to make their “selections,” in which they took various numbers of 100-500 Jews each and killed them.