Heroes of the Holocaust: Jan and Johana Lipke

Like very few people throughout Europe, when Jan Lipke witnessed an aktion against the Jews of Riga, the capital of Latvia, determined to do all that he could to save as many as he could. Unfortunately for the Jews of Riga, there were very few men like Lipke that offered comfort and aid against the Nazis.

When the Germans launched Operation Barbarossa in 1941, the Baltic states of Latvia, Estonia, and Lithuania quickly fell to the German invaders. At the time of the invasion Lipke was a dock worker, after he witnessed the previously mentioned aktion he went about being retrained to become a contractor for the Luftwaffe.

Using his new position he concocted several different methods for smuggling Jews out of the ghetto and into safe-houses throughout the surrounding area. When the places of safe harbor began to decrease as the killings increased, Lipke determined that their best bet for survival would be to dig a cellar underneath the family’s barn.

Once the cellar was completed the task of providing for their stowaways became a family affair, including the young son of Jan and Johana Lipke. The family would provide shelter, food, a radio, as well as weapons for self-preservation.

In addition to the forty Jews being hidden in their cellar, Lipke was also quite active in helping people escape from a concentration camp that was in close proximity to his home; Lipke would continue his activities through to the end of the war.

In the end, the forty Jews being held in the Lipke’s cellar would be a majority of the Latvian Jews to survive the Holocaust, forty of the approximately two hundred Jews left throughout Latvia; there had been more than 60,000 Jews in Latvia at the beginning of the Holocaust.

It is for these activities that Jan and Johana Lipke were honored by Yad Vashem as being Righteous among the Nations , an honor bestowed upon non-Jews that offered assistance, at great personal risk, to the persecuted Jews of the Holocaust.

Copyright© 2012 Ryan Bertz; all rights reserved.

Yad Vashem The Holocaust Martyrs' and Heroes' Remembrance Authority. Retrieved from: http://www1.yadvashem.org/yv/en/righteous/stories/lipke.as

The World Holocaust Forum: The International Foundation for the Commemoration of the Holocaust and its Lessons. Retrieved from: http://www.worldholocaustforum.org/eng/persons/7/