On this date in 1942, some 500 Jewish slave laborers in a concentration camp in Lutsk, Ukraine, planned a revolt against Nazi troops who were coming the next day to liquidate the camp. Having already endured the slaughter of their families, the men armed themselves with axes, knives, iron bars, acid, bricks, and small firearms. The following day they threw back the Nazi soldiers three times. The Germans then tossed grenades and artillery at the carpentry shop for twelve hours before setting it on fire. Some fifty of the Jews then killed themselves rather than die at their oppressors’ hands. Jews had lived in Lutsk since the 14th century and made up about 60 percent of urban population. The young people among them were highly politicized — as Bolsheviks, Bundists, and Zionists — and some fought as partisans in the woods. When the Soviet Red Army captured Lutsk in February, 1944, only 150 Jews, of some 20,000 in 1939, were alive.
“Suddenly there was a cry by one of the guys: ‘Death to the Germans.’ Wooden beams, stone blocks, bottles of acid [were] thrown on the heads of the gendarmes, and with them wild cries: ‘Blood! Blood for blood!’” — The Forgotten December