There is hardly a place in Latvia that can tell such a poignant and optimistic story as this modern labyrinthine memorial. Žanis Lipke was a big-hearted man with an adventurous streak. During the Nazi occupation, he found a job with the German air force, which allowed him to smuggle 56 people out of the Rīga ghetto under the pretext of using them as labourers. He hid them in his own house – now the site of the memorial.
Lipke was helped by his wife and a whole network of volunteers, some of whom played with death by walking into the ghetto to pose as the runaways during the headcount. A tree dedicated to him grows right next to Oscar Schindler's in the Garden of the Righteous inside Jerusalem's Holocaust Memorial.
