SHURA ERENSTEINE: A Jewish Sniper Who “wanted to meet the enemy at close quarters”
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.
Just months after the German invasion of the Soviet Union—Operation Babarossa—a large number of Jewish university students and Jewish members of the intelligentsia “…joined the Narodnoe opolchenie (National Guard or militia), the irregular military units whose task was to slow and, hopefully, halt the Wehrmacht assaults on major Soviet cities.”
Unfortunately, these “units were poorly trained and poorly armed, and most of those who served were killed in the first months of the war.”
This didn’t stop thousands more Jews from enlisting, including women, who filled roles as interrogators, doctors, nurses, radio operators, intelligence agents, pilots and snipers. Many of these women were determined to join the fight to get revenge for their families, murdered by the Nazis in more than 2,700 mass killing sites in the Soviet Union, such as Kiev’s Babyn Yar, Latvia’s Rumbula forest, the Minsk ghetto, and Lubny, Ukraine.
Shura Erensteine, a medical orderly in Latvia, was desperate to face the enemy on the front line. 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.” She became a sniper, the sole Jewish woman in the 201st 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 ).
By January, 1942, within the 201st Division, “more than 20 Jewish soldiers had been awarded medals.” In fact, a “high number of Jewish soldiers” joined the Latvian Rifle Corps and, Merritt writes, “the 130th Latvian Rifle Corps was commanded by a Latvian Jewish officer, Guards Captain Jazeps Pasternaks.”
For most of the war, this division fought at the Leningrad Front, including Operation Iskra where they broke through a German land blockade of Leningrad in January, 1943. From here, Shura’s 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.
By the end of the war, Shura Erensteine had a highly respectable tally of 70 kills. When she returned home to Latvia however, she would have been crushed by the overt absence of Jews who had settled in this country as far back as 1571. The World Jewish Congress describes the Latvian Jewish community before WWII as “particularly pro-Zionist,” with approximately 85,000 Jews in 1940. By 1945, 90 percent of Latvia’s Jews had been murdered and the country was again under Soviet occupation until 1991. Today, about 4,500 Jews call Latvia home, a tiny fraction of the former Jewish community.
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Jewish-Latvian Sniper WWII
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