
Steven Springfield was born in 1923 in Riga. He was 18 when Nazi Germany occupied Latvia and confined all Jews to a ghetto. In late 1941, about 28,000 Jews from the ghetto were massacred in the Rumbula forest, near Riga. Steven and his brother were sent to a small ghetto for able-bodied men then in 1943 Steven was sent to the Kaiserwald. In 1944 he was transferred to Stutthof and forced to work in a shipbuilding firm. He survived four years in Nazi camps plus one year in a Soviet prison. As with most Riga Jews, his family and everything they had were completely destroyed.
On 10 March 1947 Steven Springfield migrated to the United States where he lived in Roslyn Heights, N.Y.. He helped to form the organization of Holocaust survivors (Jewish Survivors of Latvia in the United States) and Latvian immigrants in the mid-1980s which in 1997 included more than 400 families. In 1989 — nearly 45 years after the end of World War II — Steven Springfield and other survivors returned to Latvia to reconnect with the Jewish Community and pay their respects to family members who had died. Steven Springfield, ex-President of the U.S. Organization “Jewish Survivors of Latvia”, has been an associate of Latvia’s Commission of Historians since 2000 and received the Three Star Order of Latvia in 2002.