Memorial site in Kambari Memorialinis vieta

The memorial site in Kambari is located in a place that is not easy to find. When driving along the Riga-Liepāja highway, between Annenieki and Kaķenieki, you should turn left onto a dirt road and drive about 2 kilometers.

The battles at Kambari and Ileni have gone down in history with a huge number of fallen on both sides of the army. The monument was erected at the Kambari homestead, where in January 1945 one of the most senseless battles took place, when at least 3,000 soldiers fell.

The front line of the Courland fortress advanced through Annenieki in the winter of 1944/1945. Here the 319th Regiment of the 308th Latvian Rifle Division of the Red Army fought against the units of the 19th Division of the Latvian SS Volunteer Legion. Here Latvians fought against Latvians.

Photographer, publicist and writer Gunārs Birkmanis recorded the memories of his schoolmate Alfons Kalniņš in his book “Reflections of a Century”: In 1946, we went to the Īleni and Kambari fields to look for weapons. There, two large fields were full of the remains of fallen Red Army soldiers. A thousand, I think, or more skeletons in gray Russian army overcoats. They had nothing: no weapons, no belongings, no documents that would indicate their belonging. We knew that they were Latvians mobilized by the Russians.

During the Soviet years, a memorial was erected at this place, interpreting what happened there in the Soviet spirit. The monument – the figures of a standing girl and a young man – was brought from one of the many nearby Brothers' Cemeteries, when soldiers were reburied there. The old inscription in Latvian and Russian is still on the plaque: "Here were battles of 1944. gada XII and 1945. gada I for the liberation of the region from the German occupiers". A small memorial stone "Missing soldier 1944-1945" has recently been placed nearby.