German soccer fans memorialize Jews deported from area near club’s home

Fans of German soccer club Schalke have unveiled a memorial to commemorate the deportation of more than 500 Jews from the local area to a ghetto in Riga, Latvia, 80 years ago to the day.

The group of around 20 fans — who’ve been working with the club, the city of Gelsenkirchen, local historians and the local Jewish community — want to bring attention to the atrocity, remember its victims and highlight the terror Germans wrought under National Socialism.

“It’s important for us to create an awareness of what happened in this place back then, with the task of ensuring that it never happens again,” Schalke fan Ines Kempken tells The Associated Press in a phone call.

Early on January 27, 1942, Nazis packed more than 500 of their Jewish compatriots onto a five-carriage eastbound train at Gelsenkirchen station and brought them on a five-day journey in freezing conditions more than 1,600 kilometers (1,000 miles) to the ghetto in Riga, Latvia, which was occupied by Germany at the time.

“The murders began immediately upon arrival,” Schalke says on its website. The club says around 450 of those deported that day from Gelsenkirchen were killed before the end of World War II.

Rolf Abrahamson was one of the last survivors, and he spoke with those involved in the project, sharing his experience of the mass deportation. Abrahamson died in December.

Schalke says the fans involved in the project felt compelled “to make the immeasurable suffering of Gelsenkirchen’s Jews more visible” after they had taken part in a club-organized visit to the Auschwitz concentration camp.

There had been a larger commemorative event planned for Thursday, but it was postponed to a later unscheduled date due to the coronavirus pandemic.

Thursday is also International Holocaust Remembrance Day, which falls on the anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration and extermination camp on January 27, 1945.