September 4: Resistance in Dubossary

In Dubossary, Moldova, a Jewish underground group led by Yakov Guzanyatskii assassinated a Nazi commander on this date in 1941. It was an act of vengeance for the murder, the previous day, of six hundred elderly Jews who had been driven into the town’s eight synagogues and then burned to death. Guzanyatskii’s group had previously blown up a bridge over the Dniester River and hanged a Dubossary man who had participated in the executions of six Jews. On the same day as the execution of the Nazi commander, another Jewish partisan group, led by Efim Boim, blew up a large cache of German weaponry. “By the end of the year,” writes Martin Gilbert in The Holocaust, “five Jewish partisan groups had begun to operate in the environs of Dubossary, their ranks filled by Jews escaping from Dubossary itself, from Tuchin and Mogilev, and by Soviet prisoners of war escaping captivity.” “By September 28 about 6,000 Jews had been murdered. In September 1943 thousands of Jews were brought to Dubossary from Bessarabia and Moldavia and ‘liquidated’ there. Some managed to join the partisans in the neighborhood. After the liberation of Dubossary on August 14, 1944, the Soviet Commission for Investigation of Nazi Crimes found that about 18,000 Jewish victims were buried in mass graves near the town. Approximately 100 to 150 survivors returned after the war.” —Kehillahlinks