For the second day in a row, on this date in 1943, Yanis Lipke, a former dock worker in the port of Riga, Latvia, saved three Jews from the Riga ghetto by offering Latvian fascist guards two packs of cigarettes for “some Yids to work in my kitchen garden.” Having witnessed extensive brutality against Jews in Riga, Lipke had purposefully joined a Luftwaffecivilian organization assigned with transporting slave labor from the ghetto. He used this position to smuggle more than forty Jews to safety over the course of three years, until the Red Army swept in (October 13, 1944). With the assistance of his wife, Yohanna, and their eldest son, Alfred, Lipke hid his wards in a cave he’d dug beneath his chicken coop as well as in the homes of neighbors. Yanis and Yohanna were named by Yad Vashem in Israel as one of the “Righteous Among the Nations.” When he died in 1987, the Jews of Riga arranged his funeral.
“In addition to providing shelter for the hidden Jews, Lipke smuggled food and medicine into the ghetto. He also found three other men to help him save the Jews of the nearby village of Dobele — Yanis Undulis, and the brothers Fritz and Yan Rosenthal. Two of the Dobele Jews were hidden in a haystack at Yan Rosenthal’s farm. Several more were hidden at a farm belonging to Fritz Rosenthal’s aunt, Wilhelmina Putrinia. . . . [Lipke] rescued Isaak Dryzin, his brother and another man, Sheyenson, from the ghetto itself on Yom Kippur, October 10, 1943. Lipke took them to the nearest doorway, tore off their yellow stars, gave them peasants’ hats to put on, and drove them to the farm of another friend, where they were hidden in barns and haystacks. He told the Dryzin brothers: ‘Tomorrow I will go to the ghetto again and will keep bringing people here every day.’”–Deathcamps.org