September 2: Unarmed Resistance

On this date in 1942, the population of the ghetto of Lachva in Poland/Belorussia were informed that some farmers had been ordered by the Nazis to dig large pits outside the town, and that 150 German soldiers from an Einsatzgruppe mobile murder squad, along with 200 local auxiliaries, had surrounded the ghetto. The next day, Dov Lopatyn, a Zionist leader who headed the Lachva Judenrat, refused Nazi commands to organize the remaining 2,000 Jews for deportation. When the Nazis entered the ghetto, Lopatyn and the local youth underground led by Isaac Rochczyn led some 800 Jews, armed with axes, clubs, and Molotov cocktails, in an attack, one of the very earliest ghetto uprisings of the war. Some 100 Nazis were killed or wounded, while more than half of the Jewish population was either killed in the fighting or massacred in the pits. Ninety would survive the war. Lopatyn joined a communist partisan group and was killed by a landmine on February 21, 1944. “Either we all live, or we all die.” —Dov Lopatyn