Information AboutLakhva |
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Lakhva (or Lachva, Lachwa) (, in Brest Voblast , approximately 80 kilometres to the east of Pinsk and 200 kilometres south of Minsk . The population is approximately 2100. Before the Second World War , Lakhva was a Shtetl in eastern Poland with a sizeable Jewish population of about 2,300. The Jewish population increased by 40% between 1939 and 1941, when Germany and the Soviet Union partitioned Poland, and Jewish refugees fled German-occupied areas to those lands incorporated into the Soviet Union. Germany invaded the Soviet Union in 1941, and German troops occupied Lakhva on July 8, 1941. On April 1, 1942, the town's Jews were forcibly moved into a Ghetto consisting of two streets surrounded by a barbed wire fence. On September 2 , 1942 , the local populace became aware that the Nazis were digging pits outside the town. Later that day, 150 German soldiers (the '' Einsatzgruppen '') and 200 local police surrounded the ghetto. Dov Lopatyn , the head of the local Judenrat , refused the German request for the ghetto inhabitants to line up for deportation. On September 3 , members of the ghetto underground attacked the Germans as they entered the ghetto, using axes, sticks, Molotov Cocktails and their bare hands. This battle represented one of the first Ghetto Uprising s of the war. Approximately 650 Jews were killed in the fighting, and another 500 or so Jews were taken to the pits and shot. The ghetto wall was breached, and approximately 1000 Jews were able to escape, of whom about 600 were able to take refuge in the Pripet Marshes . Although an estimated 120 of the escapees were able to join Partisan units, most of the others were eventually tracked down and killed. Approximately 90 residents of the ghetto survived the war. Lopatyn joined a communist partisan unit, and was killed on February 21 , 1944 by a Landmine . Lakhva was liberated by the Red Army in July 1944 . At present, there are few, if any, Jewish inhabitants in Lakhva, although a small memorial to the 1942 Jewish uprising was erected in 1994. REFERENCES
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