The German army entered the Soviet occupation zone on 22 June 1941 under the codename Operation Barbarossa and two weeks later, on 8 July 1941, overran the town of Łachwa, located in the Polesie Voivodeship of the Second Polish Republic before 1939 [REF].
On 1 April 1942, the town's Jews were forcibly moved into a new ghetto consisting of two streets and 45 houses, and surrounded by a barbed wire fence [REF].