Train to Darzini

Being a small country it is easy to get to and back from most places in a day. Having spent my time in Poland in central Warsaw I decided I’d get out of Riga and check out the countryside in Latvia a little more.

The train out of Riga is much like most places here in the Baltic Nations with urban build up giving way quickly to pine forest and patches of birch and spruce. The train I am on is heading for Salaspils yet I’m getting off one stop before at Darzini. You conclude quickly as you stand on the platform with the train heading out of view that this is hardly a remarkable place. There is a small brick building looking more like a toilet block than a now disused station office. There is no one to be seen, no shops, roads, offices. It is one of those places you see from time to time with a place name and wander just what its significance or history might be. Australia is littered with such places and names. If you look hard on the Blue Mountains train line you might see a sign ‘Newness Junction’ once a significant branch line for steam locomotives pulling shale out of the Newness Valley which a newly federated nation had poured enormous resources and pinned their hopes on shale oil being its avenue into an industrialising world economy. Well everything was on track until the discovery of Texas Tea, oil that is, and the industry crashed overnight. The refinery was pulled down for scrap, the houses transported, train lines pulled up and Newnes Junction is nothing more than a small sign on a lonely bit of rail line near Bell.

So stepping off the train at Darzini with nothing but a forest of pines on both sides of the tracks and a shoebox shaped brick building standing abandoned on one side you might pause and wonder just why does this place without a postcard have a train station? The sound of the train slowly fades into the distance to be replaced by the sound of a lonely breeze through the pines. I had come here for a reason though. Beyond this sign lay not the hopes, if ill fated, of an ambitions nation but the brutal ambitions of ethnic cleansing and yet another Nazi concentration camp. My guide book instructs me to follow a path from the station to the piemineklis, (memorial). There are no signs giving directions and hardly a path but a number of unformed tracks leading off into the forest in various directions.

Standing on the platform considering the various paths seemly leading nowhere it is hard to contemplate that down the end of one of these paths over 100, 000 people where murdered by the Nazis. Even harder to contempt that by nazi standards 100,000 murdered is not considered a large camp.


I had contemplated going to Auschwitz, the epicentre of the holocaust, while in Poland but stories of masses of people descending on this cite during the summer months put me off a little. I am sure that most people that go there are profoundly affected by the experience, how could you not be, yet there was something telling me that I didn’t want to go there to tick it off my itinerary. Warsaw done tick, Krakow done tick, Auschwitz done tick. If I was going to experience a scene of nazi atrocities then I was going to do it on my terms and stand sit walk and ponder at my pace and not be part of a queue being jostled along to the next ‘point of interest’. For me being in a lonely forest where 100,000 had been murdered was just a poignant as anything I could have imagined and in a way being so lonely, isolated and forgotten I felt closer to the souls of those who perished yet few know of.. Those who perished in the forests here sadly become notable only as a statistic now and Darzini is just a place name, a sign affix to the side of a railway platform.