Ziering and his younger brother spent their grammar school years dodging Hitler Youth on the way to and from school. In 1938, his father managed to leave Nazi Germany just prior to the invasion of Poland, using a group passport for transferring adult male Jews of Polish background to the Kitchener Camp in England. He wanted to take his family with him, but Ziering’s mother thought it was too risky to take the children across the border without proper documentation. In 1941, Herman, his mother, his brother, his aunt and her daughter were loaded onto unheated rail cars with approximately 1000 others in the middle of winter and sent to Riga, Latvia. They were settled in the Jewish ghetto, which had been “cleared” in a mass shooting of 27,800 Latvian Jews while the Jews from Kassel were en route. The immediate family survived the ghetto by obtaining food “illegally,” through barter or theft, since rations were insufficient for survival. Ziering’s aunt and her young daughter did not survive, being caught up in one of the events called “Aktions,” during which ghetto dwellers deemed too old, too young, or too infirm to work were rounded up into trucks and disappeared. During one such Aktion, Ziering witnessed Latvian SS members shooting Jews who failed to get on the truck fast enough and smashing the heads of babies against the truck. When the Russians approached Riga in 1944 and the ghetto was liquidated, Ziering and his mother and brother were transferred to several work camps and prisons, and narrowly escaped assignment to a death camp.  At the notorious Neuengamme, their final stop before being rescued by the Swedish Red Cross, the family witnessed a two week evacuation process during which 15,000 prisoners were killed. Nevertheless, Ziering, his brother, and his mother all survived and were reunited with his father in 1946. 

The entire family emigrated to the New York in 1949. During the decade and a half after the war, Ziering served a stint in the US army in Germany, started and maintained a thriving real estate business, buried his father, married, and raised a family with his wife Lea. But he never forgot his experience during the Shoah. He remained in contact with fellow Riga survivors. Many of those who, like himself, had been adolescents at the time had lost their parents and were informally “adopted” by his mother after the War. In the early 1970s, Ziering’s sense of responsibility began to solidify into two efforts that were to occupy him for the remainder of his life: doing justice to the memory of fellow Riga survivors and honoring to the dead in contributions to historical memory of the ghetto, and identifying and bringing to justice war criminals hiding out in the United States. Both of these efforts stemmed from his service as Vice President of the Society of Survivors of the Riga Ghetto.

Herman Ziering did not emerge unscathed from the Shoah. He was preoccupied with it, telling and retelling his memories to everyone he could including his children. He was unable to forget the sheer arbitrariness of his own survival, and of the persistence of the will to live in the absence of any belief that he would live. “If I’m alive,” he said, “probably someone else died instead of me.” For that reason, he thought, “you cannot forget the people you left behind.” The dead questioned his life. His determination to face what happened rather than to forget or flee his experience, exhibited not only in his talks with his children or his work with the Society but in his willingness to return to Germany as part of U.S. occupation forces and, much later, to the very cell in a Hamburg prison where he had been held after the Riga ghetto liquidation, and in his preservation of his concentration camp uniform, reflected this sense of the contingency of his own survival and his responsibility to the dead. But the Shoah did not consume him. His children remember him as a fun-loving and playful man with an intense and courageous love of life. Herman Ziering’s life is an inspiration and a reminder that the abandonment of a progressive narrative announcing premature victory over the evil of the Shoah and an appreciation of its enormity and persistent effects need not result in a passive fatalism on the part of scholars, artists, politicians, or the general public.