The actress Charlotte Schiemann lived in Riga with her husband, the Baltic German journalist and politician Paul Schiemann. In the course of their assault on the Soviet Union, German troops captured the city in June 1941. The Schiemanns witnessed Riga’s Jews being persecuted by the German occupiers and their local helpers. At the beginning of 1943, the Jewish woman Valentīna Freimane asked the couple for help. She had already been on the run for almost two years. The Schiemanns offered her shelter in their home. They became friends, and Freimane helped the severely ill Paul Schiemann to write a memoir.
Paul Schiemann died in June 1944. When Riga was captured by the Red Army shortly afterward, Charlotte Schiemann decided to move back to her family in Bavaria. She took the manuscript dictated by her husband with her, and Paul Schiemann’s memoir was published in 1979.
On Valentīna Freimane’s initiative, Charlotte Schiemann was honored as Righteous Among the Nations by the Israeli Holocaust memorial center Yad Vashem in 1999.