LAPICHI
[End Page 1694] Pre-1941: Lapichi, village, Osipo vichi raion, Mogilev oblast’, Belorussian SSR; 1941–1944: Lapitschi, Rear Area, Army Group Center (rückwärtiges Heeresgebiet Mitte); post-1991: Lapichy, Asipovichy raen, Mahiliou voblasts’, Republic of Belarus
Lapichi is located about 60 kilometers (37 miles) northwest of Bobruisk. According to the census of 1926, there were 709 Jews living in the village. By mid-1941, emigration had considerably reduced the Jewish population.
German forces captured the village in early July 1941, two weeks after their invasion of the USSR. During this intervening period, a few Jews managed to evacuate to the east, but many who tried to leave were forced to return by the rapid advance of the German forces.1 About 300 Jews remained in the village at the start of the occupation.
Throughout the German occupation, from July 1941 to June 1944, a military commandant’s office (Ortskommandantur) governed the village. The German commandant established a village authority and an auxiliary police force recruited from local residents. Soon after the occupation, the German commandant ordered the village authority to register and mark the Jews and organize their exploitation for various types of forced labor.
On August 18, 1941, the first Aktion took place, in which a detachment of Einsatzkommando 8 shot 107 Jews who were accused of engaging in sabotage and supporting the partisans.2 Survivor Inna Viktorovna Voinova, who stayed in Lapichi after her attempt to flee from Minsk was blocked by German forces, recalled that on August 18 (Aviation Day in the Soviet Union) rumors spread that the Red Army would come and save them. Instead, Germans and local police (politsai) surrounded the town and escorted all the Jewish men into the woods and shot them. After this first Aktion, mostly women, children, and the elderly remained in Lapichi, living in constant fear as news of further executions in the region arrived daily.3
Information on whether a ghetto existed in Lapichi is very sparse. According to Voinova, the Germans did not permit Russians and Jews to live together, but otherwise her testimony seems to indicate that most Jews continued to live in their own homes. In January 1942, the Germans and local police surrounded part of the town and gathered all the Jews there into three houses. Everyone expected that this was the end, but most Jews were sent home and ordered to pack up their warm clothing (presumably for donation to the German army). However, 10 or 12 people—some old men and a few teenagers—were kept behind and then shot next to the village fence.4
The women and children remained alive until April 1942. Then, in a single day, Germans and local police from Osipovichi surrounded the village, gathered all the Jews together, and shot them in a large ditch. More than 140 people were murdered in this Aktion.
Voinova recalls that her survival was due to a fortunate circumstance: “When the Germans came to take everyone away, my Aunt Tonia told them that there was a Russian girl whose parents had been arrested and that she lived in the house. The German ordered me to go to the other half of the house, where a Russian family lived. And so I continued to live.”5
Different relatives of the famous Yiddish poet Moshe Kulbak died in all three of the Aktions conducted against the Jews of Lapichi, which meant that they were buried in three separate graves.
SOURCES
Inna Viktorovna Voinova’s recollections of her experiences in Lapichi during the war were published in Sovetish Heymland, no. 8 (1990), and are available in English translation on the Web at www.eilatgordinlevitan.com/kurenets/k_pages/kulbak.html. Other relevant publications include V. Zaitsev and V. Novik, “Iz istorii Kholokosta v Osipovichskom raione,” in D.V. Prokudin and Il’ia Al’tman, eds., My ne mozhem molchat’. Shkol’niki i studenty o Kholokoste. Vyp. 4: Sbornik (Moscow: Tsentr i Fond “Kholokost,” 2008); Christian Gerlach, Kalkulierte Morde: Die deutsche Wirtschafts- und Vernichtungspolitik in Weissrussland 1941 bis 1944 (Hamburg: HIS, 1999), p. 568; “Lapichi,” in Rossiiskaia Evreiskaia Entsiklopediia, vol. 5: 263-264 (Moscow: Rossiiskaia Akademiia Estestvennykh Nauk, Nauchnyi Fond “Evreiskaia Entsiklopediia,” “Epos,” 2004); Shmuel Spector and Geoffrey Wigoder, eds., The Encyclopedia of Jewish Life before and during the Holocaust (Jerusalem: Yad Vashem; New York: New York University Press, 2001), p. 705; and Marat Botvinnik, in Pamiatniki genotsida evreev Belarusi (Minsk: Belaruskaia Navuka, 2000).
Documentation on the persecution and murder of the Jews of Lapichi can be found in the following archives: GAMO; GARF (7021-82-5); and NARB.
NOTES
1. See “War Survivors,” available at www.levins.info/history/SurvivedWar.html.
2. See the report of the 252nd Infantry Division for August 18, 1941: “Of the total of 179 prisoners, the SD shot: 107 Jews and three partisans,” cited in Hannes Heer, “Die Logik des Vernichtungskrieges. Wehrmacht und Partisanenkampf,” in Hannes Heer and Klaus Naumann, eds., Vernichtungskrieg. Verbrechen der Wehrmacht 1941–1944 (Hamburg: Hamburger Edition, 1997), p. 117. According to Botvinnik, Pamiatniki genotsida evreev Belarusi, 75 Jewish males were shot in a forest near the village in August 1941. In 1993, their remains were reburied in the Jewish cemetery in Osipo vichi.
3. Testimony of Inna Viktorovna Voinova, born in Minsk in 1931, available at www.eilatgordinlevitan.com/kurenets/k_pages/kulbak.html.
4. Ibid.
5. Ibid.
