At the start of the Second World War around 100,000 Jews lived in Lviv, nearly a third of its total population. Poles made up half the population – at that time Lviv was part of Poland – and the remainder (about 17%) were Ukrainians.
The Jewish population quickly increased to 150,000, as a result of Jews fleeing Nazi-occupied Poland. But in June of 1941 Lviv itself was seized by the Nazis.
Almost immediately, a "popular" Jewish pogrom was carried out by a mixture of members of the Organisation of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) and the local population. A second "popular" pogrom was staged in late July.
SS Einsatzgruppen, helped by the newly formed Ukrainian militia, "intervened" in the pogroms by rounding up Jews and conducting mass executions by firing squad. In the course of July around 5,000 Jews were killed.
In November the city’s new Nazi authorities banned Jews from all spheres of economic activity, ordered them to carry out forced labour, confiscated their possessions and accommodation, and confined them to a ghetto on the northern edge of the city centre.
It was the third biggest Jewish ghetto, after Warsaw and Lodz, in Nazi occupied-Europe.
"Popular" pogroms were replaced by systematic mass murder. Jews were deported to the death camps (such as Belzec, less than a hundred kilometers away) or murdered in the ghetto itself and the forced-labour camp on Yanivska Street.
Living conditions in the Jewish ghetto – 25 people would "live" in a two-room apartment – facilitated diseases, malnutrition and suicides, which all added to the death toll.
By the time of the Nazi withdrawal from Lviv, in July of 1944, less than 1% of the city’s pre-war Jewish population had survived. Prior to the war there had been a hundred synagogues in Lviv. By 1944 just two remained.
In the post-war decades Stalinist historiography dissolved the Nazis’ specifically antisemitic mass murder into a generalised violence inflicted on the Soviet people as a whole.
Despite the significance of Lviv in the history of the Holocaust, no monuments were erected in memory of its victims. The sites of the destroyed synagogues were variously left vacant, redesigned as public squares, or transformed into car parks (with no acknowledgement of their previous role).
The administration building of the Yanivska camp, where Nazi functionaries drew up the lists of Jews to be sent to their death in Belzec, became just another apartment block. So too did the accommodation blocks of the camp guards who murdered Jews in the camp itself.
That has changed in the decades following Ukrainian independence. The first monument to the victims of the Holocaust in Lviv was erected in 1992, designed by a Lviv Holocaust survivor.
In the late 1990s work began excavating the site of the Golden Rose Synagogue, the main synagogue in Lviv prior to the Nazi occupation, uncovering sections of remnants of its interior.
In 2008 the “Space of the Synagogues” project was initiated and a series of marble monuments installed on the Golden Rose Synagogue site, commemorating not just the synagogue itself but also the overall destruction of Lviv’s Jewish community.
The sites of other former synagogues, including that of the sixteenth century Great Synagogue, partially demolished by the Nazis in 1941 and subsequently blown up in its entirety, will also be memorialised as part of the project.
Since 2021 street signage and displays have been installed in the streets of what were once Lviv’s Jewish quarters, outlining the history and destruction of the city’s Jewish community.
Particularly impressive, if that is the right word, has been the creation of the “Memorial Museum of Totalitarian Regimes – Territory of Terror”, located on the site of the wartime Jewish ghetto and a Stalinist transit camp for post-war deportations.
Initiated in 2009, it was built between 2014 and 2016.
The bulk of the museum consists of displays of Holocaust "artefacts" (such as the instruments of a concentration camp "orchestra", or the possessions of Jews who were killed in the Yanivska camp), oral-history recordings of Lviv Holocaust survivors, the reconstruction of a concentration camp barracks, and hundreds of family photographs of local victims of the Holocaust.
Other displays cover Stalin’s post-war mass deportations of Ukrainians, mainly carried out in the years 1949-52.
These displays include one of the railway cattle wagons (manufactured in the German "Democratic" Republic in 1951) used for the deportations, the reconstruction of a typical NKVD archive, and a collection of Soviet-era monuments which gave visual expression to the Stalinist mythology of the Great Patriotic War.
To bring the theme of totalitarian regimes and terror up-to-date, a display at the entrance to the museum has the names and pictures of the 53 Ukrainian solders murdered by the Russians in the Olenvika prison camp in July of 2022.
Lviv’s rescue of the Holocaust from the Stalinist rewriting of history which, at best, glossed over the targeted mass murder of Jews, has an obvious immense value in and of itself.
But it also exposes the mendacity of Putin’s "justification" for his war on Ukraine, a "justification" which is parroted by his apologists who write for and read the Morning Star, and by their counterparts in other countries.
Ukraine, they claim, has been run by Nazis and neo-Nazis since the Maidan Revolution of Dignity of 2014. And yet, a country supposedly run by the heirs of Nazism is restoring the memory of the victims of the Nazi Holocaust.
Something which certainly cannot be said of Putin’s "anti-fascist" Russia.
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