Sara (Shura) Erenshtein: A Tribute to a Latvian Jewish Sniper from her daughter, Fira Erenshtein

Shelly Sanders|October 1, 2024|

Sara Erenshtein: Latvian Jewish Sniper

When the Germans invaded Latvia in 1941, few Jews left Riga—their news had been censored for years so they didn’t know how the Nazis were treating Jews elsewhere in Europe. Sara Erenshtein, however, fled Riga for Uzbekistan on the last available train with her parents, four siblings, and three nieces and nephews. Her mother, one of her sons and one of her nephews died during their WWII escape from Latvia, and when the rest of the family finally arrived in Uzbekistan, food was scarce. Sara’s father died of typhus soon after their arrival and Sara had no choice but to send her younger brothers to an orphanage.

Shortly after her family’s disastrous journey, in 1942, Sara volunteered as a medical orderly in the 125th rifle regiment of the 43rd Latvian division, marking the start of her astounding time with the Red Army.

While serving on the front as a medical orderly, Sara completed sniper officer courses; her commander, Zhanis Griva wrote in ‘Snegurochka’ (Snow Maiden) after the war, that “she demonstrated her excellent shooting skills. Once during test shooting, she made five shots and all five hit the bull’s eye, which surprised the command, and even more surprised them because she was a girl.”

“She combined the work of a medical orderly and a sniper, bandaged everyone, even the doomed. The soldiers survived, thanks to her ardent hope for a miracle. She would pull four soldiers at a time from the battlefield: she would drag two of them, holding on to her legs, and two more wounded would lean on her shoulders.”

At some point, Sara’s given nam was changed to the Russian name, Shura, because Sara sounded too Jewish for the Soviets, and may have led to anti-Semitic actions against her from other members of her division.

The commander of the company in which Shura served, I. Katz, recalled: “I was especially amazed by our two girls, snipers Monika Meikshan and Shura Erenshteyn. They were young, fragile, tender, and with their thin hands they lifted tall soldiers like babies… This was a school of trials, hard physical labor, all the horrors of war, a school for which they paid an exorbitant fee, I think, should have given them a diploma – a pass to personal happiness, well-being, peace.”

In an interview for a Latvian publication on April 9, 1943, Shura says she “always wanted to meet the enemy at close quarters so that I could destroy him with my own hands.” Shura was the sole Jewish woman in the 201^st Latvian Rifle Division, as noted by Harry C. Merritt, ‘In the Fight, yet on the Margins: Latvian Jewish Red Army Soldiers’ (www.peripheralhistories.co.uk ).

Shura’s sniper commander, Zhanis Griva, wrote about one extraordinary mission: “She received the task of knocking out the Germans who were shelling positions from a knocked out tank. This duel required preliminary camouflage. Shura went out before dawn, quietly took up a position, dug herself into the snow. It was very cold. In the morning, the Germans carried breakfast to the tank, there were two of them. She fired, one fell, fired again, the second fell. After a while, a German got out of the tank. He was approaching the dead, and she shot him. Then she fired several shots into the open hatch, the machine gun fell silent.

“It was impossible to leave right away, because they might notice, so she lay in the snow until evening; it was hard to move from the cold, she was completely frozen, she returned frozen with luck.”

For most of the war, Sara’s division fought at the Leningrad Front, including Operation Iskra where they broke through a German land blockade of Leningrad in January, 1943. From here, the division tried but failed to eliminate the Demyansk salient, then became one of the units on the Northwestern Front with orders to take part in local battles to gather intelligence.

“Once my mother decided to go on a mission with the scouts,” Fira recalls. And when the Germans discovered the five of them, the shelling began. “Two of the scouts were killed, all five with my mother lay in one row.

“After a short time, a German came up and checked with a bayonet whether everyone was killed. He stepped over one, and luckily pierced only those who were already killed. He took off my mother’s felt boots.”

In the battles near Narofominsk (Novosokolniki, near Moscow), Shlomo Komaisky, one of Sara’s frontline comrades, told Fira, “there was such a barrage of fire that all the men, even those who had been shot at, pressed themselves to the ground, rising only when they heard Sara screaming. They saw her thin figure standing among the exploding shells with her rifle raised. It was a shame not to stand up.

“She shot flawlessly from a sniper rifle, she had dozens of destroyed fascists on her combat account, legends were told about her, front-line newspapers were full of her name, even German newspapers at the front drew caricatures of her, where she shot from around the corner from a rifle bent at an angle of 90 degrees.”

By the end of the war, Sara Erenshtein had a highly respectable tally of 70 kills. But this success came at a high price. Fira says her “mother was wounded and shell-shocked. After a head wound and concussion, Sara did not return to the front. She wrote the following about her experiences as a sniper and medical orderly: “The war tore our youth into pieces and scattered them along the front roads. It also buried happiness, love, and dreams there.”

Many years after the war, Fira recalls how her mother was still traumatized by her experiences in the war. “Around 1962, when I was 11 or12 years old, my mother was ill, so I studied at a boarding school for some time. It so happened that my mother visited her friend Evgenia Rink, – blessed memory. They were probably talking about the war, when suddenly my mother began to say that there was a fire all around and her head was burning, burning, burning and she was hot, although it was an ordinary cool day. My mother’s friend told her, Shurochka, everything is fine, cold, cold, cold.

“This went on for three days, Mom said that her head was burning and there was fire all around, and Evgenia put a cool towel on her head, gave her cool water, and talked, talked, talked, calming her down that everything was fine…, cold, cold. So this woman saved Mom from a mental hospital. Nothing passes without a trace. When I returned home from the boarding school for the weekend a week later, Mom was fine.”

Two years later, when Fira had an operation in a Riga hospital, she remembers the surgeon, Dr. Yosef Baron, who was in Sara’s platoon, calmly said: “This is the daughter of the bravest woman who, during the war, saved us men, then still inexperienced boys. We had to get out of the trench and pick up the wounded, we couldn’t get off the ground, we were afraid to raise our heads, and she did it for us, while we got used to the whistle of bullets and the explosion of grenades. A girl of rare courage.”

Sara, a disabled war veteran, died from an electrical injury in 1970.

Fittingly, ‘Snegurochka’, written by Sara’s sniper commander, ends with the words: “… why am I not a sculptor? I would carve you, Snegurochka, in marble, so that everyone could see what a beautiful and heroic woman once lived in this world.”

“War leaves not only physical wounds, but also heavy emotional ones,” Fira concludes with honesty and hope, “because people are in unbearable living conditions both at the front and in the rear. They lose friends, relatives, loved ones, children.”

Fira certainly knows what it’s like to live with the loss of beloved relatives. Her paternal grandparents, Markus and Yenta Erenstein, were killed in the Riga ghetto. All five of their sons fought at the front in the Red Army and one was killed. And yet, Fira is filled with hope. “I want to believe that the time will when people will become kind, warm-hearted, able to understand each other, empathize and help,” she writes. “They say that there are no obstacles to thought in our universe, so let gratitude and warmth of heart envelop this extraordinary woman and bright memory to her. After all, every day in life, not only at the front, people perform feats.”

Between 350,000 and 500,000 Jews served in the Red Army in WWII, or The Great Patriotic War, as it was called in Russia, an estimate provided by ‘Jews in the Red Army, 1941-1945’, a research project conducted by The International Institute for Holocaust Research at Yad Vashem (The World Holocaust Remembrance Center), in Israel. Thousands of these Jews were women, including Shura (Sara) Erenshtein, from Latvia.

If you’re interested in reading more about unsung Jewish female snipers and interrogators, pre-order The Night Sparrow, HarperCollins, Canada, US, Australia, 2025 here: