Editor’s Note: On June 30, 1941, eight days after Germany declared war on the Soviet Union, Nazi troops marched into Lviv.
Editor’s Note: On June 30, 1941, eight days after Germany declared war on the Soviet Union, Nazi troops marched into Lviv.
They occupied a city overcrowded by refugees and traumatized by two years of brutal Soviet rule, which began in September 1939 with the beginning of World War II.
While Ukrainians largely welcomed German troops in the hope that Hitler would support an independent Ukrainian state, it did not take long for many Lviv residents to realize Nazi rule was no better – and often worse – than Soviet.
The situation for the city’s Jews was particularly precarious. Within hours of entering Lviv, pogroms were unleashed against its Jewish community. Over the next two years, Germans, often with the aid of local citizens, systematically annihilated the city’s Jews.
By the time Germans quit Lviv in defeat on July 26, 1944, the Jewish community was decimated. To mark the 70-year anniversary of Germany’s June 22, 1941 invasion of the Soviet Union, the Kyiv Post begins a five-part series chronicling the life, death and remembrance of Lviv’s Jewish community.
Undoubtedly, Jews throughout modern-day Ukraine suffered great losses in the Final Solution, Nazi Germany’s plan to eradicate Jews from Europe.
As residents of Halychyna, a historic territory that comprises today’s western Ukraine and eastern Poland, however, Jews there found themselves at the epicenter of the Holocaust.
What remains today are the echoes of a community that inhabited the region for over eight centuries and was the birthplace of many of the Western world’s leading religious, political and literary figures.
Part 1: Boris Orych and western Ukraine Jews
LVIV, Ukraine – As advancing Nazi forces began bombing outlying areas of Lviv in September 1939, the headlines of local Jewish newspaper Chwila rang with hope: “Large losses for the German military on the Western front”; “Why Hitler will have to lose the present war; the Third Reich’s catastrophic economic and financial situation.”
By 1944, only 700 of 220,000 Jews in Lviv were alive
In the weeks before these articles on Sept. 10, stories ran of life continuing despite the approaching storm: a series on Jewish history by renowned historian
Majer Balaban, a drawing competition for a trip to a local resort and personal ads from a landlady looking for a lodger to a doctor offering help to the sick.
But this issue of Chwila turned out to be the last.
Lviv, then part of Poland, found itself at the conflux of two marauding armies – Stalin’s Red Army from the east and the Nazis from the west. Both brought with them ideologies that proved devastating to the city’s population, most of all its Jews.
Under Soviet occupation, which lasted until June 1941, all of Lviv’s Yiddish organizations were liquidated and its leaders arrested. Much worse was to come. By the summer of 1944, Nazi efforts to eradicate Jews from Europe forever changed Lviv.
The city’s Jewish population, which comprised one-third of the 340,000 residents before the war, was nearly destroyed. Only 700 Jews survived of more than 220,000 who were present in Lviv during the war.
The way of life chronicled by the Zionist Polish-language daily Chwila came to an abrupt end – the final curtain for the rich and complex tale of the Jewish community that for centuries had made Lviv its home.
A fuller picture of the life of western Ukrainian Jews started to be pieced together with the opening of archives following the collapse of the Soviet Union.
Scholars, journalists and individuals like Boris Orych started combing through the city’s archives and libraries, read through the historian Balaban’s works, a plethora of Yiddish-, Polish-, German- and Ukrainian-language documents, as well as Chwila, which the Soviets had locked away and classified as top secret.
The last issue of the Chwila newspaper, which provided news to the Jewish community, came out on Sept. 10, 1939. Image courtesy of periodicals department named after Mar’yan and Ivanna Kotsiv, V. Stefanyk Lviv National Academic Library (Pavlo Palamarchuk)
Even though more than 20 tons of archival documents had been removed from Lviv and hauled to Moscow after the war, little by little these individuals began to reconstruct the Jewish community’s past.
Orych, who died shortly after his 90th birthday earlier this year, was considered a walking encyclopedia of Lviv’s Jewish history. For countless years, this spritely man could be seen, rain or shine, giving tours of Jewish Lviv.
Orych had thrust himself into archival research in 1991 just as he was turning 70. The task of reconstructing Lviv’s Jewish history was very personal to him, he told the Kyiv Post in one of his last interviews.
“People should not forget the past,” he said. Orych’s parents died in Auschwitz in 1943; keeping alive the memory of those Jews who had perished during World War II also meant keeping alive theirs.
Boris Orych, who died this year, stitched together a history of Lviv’s lost Jewish community.
The Jewish past in Lviv stretches back to the city’s beginnings.
Jews settled there shortly after the city was founded in the 13th century during the reign of King Danylo Halych.
They established two communities – one within the city limits itself, and the other in the Krakiv suburb district. Both districts were given relative internal autonomy in 1360 by Polish King Casimir the Great, who had conquered Lviv 20 years previously.
Involved primarily in trade and handicrafts, the community flourished. The latter part of the 16th and first half of the 17th centuries was a “golden period” for Lviv’s Jews, Orych said. Its members achieved significant social status as financiers, doctors and teachers, while religious and cultural thought swiftly developed.
Jews settled there shortly after the city was founded in the 13th century during the reign of King Danylo Halych.They established two communities – one within the city limits itself, and the other in the Krakiv suburb district.
The outstanding monument of Jewish culture in Lviv was built during this period, in 1582: the Golden Rose Synagogue. Orych, who came to Lviv as a refugee in 1939, remembers the Golden Rose’s beauty.
“I was struck by the magnificent ornamentation of the interior: the amazing beauty of the brass lighting, supported by deer horns, the sumptuous holy ark, the bimah on which a chair was placed for circumcision,” he wrote in 2005.
Three years after his visit, the synagogue was destroyed by a Nazi bomb.
The period of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, which lasted from 1772-1918, proved to be more problematic as Jews fought for their civil rights and against assimilation. Lviv became a center for several religious movements, which were sometimes at odds with one another, Orych said.
One such movement, Hasidism, was popular in Lviv. Founded in the mid-18th century by Rabbi Israel Baal Shem Tov, who was born in Okopy in today’s Ternopil Oblast, Hasidism was characterized by religious zeal, spirit of prayer, joy and charity and gave many Jews hope in difficult economic times. Today, it is part of Ultra-Orthodox Judaism and pilgrims frequently make visits to sites where revered religious figures are buried.
Orych wrote extensively about those individuals who established Jewish religious schools in Lviv, as well as those who were proponents of Haskalah, or Jewish Enlightenment.
Hasidism, was popular in Lviv. Founded in the mid-18th century by Rabbi Israel Baal Shem Tov, who was born in Okopy in today’s Ternopil Oblast, Hasidism was characterized by religious zeal, spirit of prayer, joy and charity and gave many Jews hope in difficult economic times.
Haskalah, which grew among European Jews in the 18th and 19th centuries, advocated adopting values of enlightenment, pressed for better integration into European society, and increased education in secular studies.
In 1844, Lviv’s first progressive synagogue, the Temple, was established, as well as the city’s first secular Jewish school, which sat close to today’s Opera House.
By World War I, Lviv’s Jewish community had grown in strength and importance. Its Jewish quarters quickly developed, new synagogues were erected, schools, education and culture were on the rise.
But the community also suffered a period of terror – pogroms which spread throughout Poland in 1918. Up to 150 Jewish residents were killed, hundreds were wounded and looting was carried out by Polish soldiers, citizens and criminals from Nov. 21-23 that year.
The newspaper Chwila was established in 1919 as a reaction to those events and to give the community a louder voice; other Jewish papers had previously been published in Lviv, but none carried its weight.
Devoted to political, social and cultural affairs, for two decades its contributors included some of the region’s most prominent Jewish figures.
Chwila’s demise in 1939 signaled the start of a new period of terror for Jews in Lviv.
TIMELINE: World War II in Lviv
Aug. 23, 1939 – Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union sign the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact in which both powers pledge to remain neutral if either country were attacked by a third party. The treaty contained a secret protocol dividing Northern and Eastern Europe into German and Soviet spheres of influence.
As part of the pact on:
– Sept. 1, 1939 – Germany invades Poland
– Sept. 17, 1939 – Soviet troops cross the Polish border.
– Sept. 22, 1939-June 30, 1941 – Lviv falls under Soviet rule.
The period is marked by deportations and executions of all nationalities, particularly the elite and those opposed to Soviet rule. Lviv’s Jewish population, which numbered 110,000 before the war, swells to 200,000.
June 22, 1941 – Nazi Germany invades the Soviet Union at 3:15 a.m., violating the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact.
June 23-26, 1941 – Nearly 7,000 inmates – mostly Ukrainians and Poles, but also Jews – are murdered at three area prisons, including infamous Brygidki. The event becomes a negative milestone in Ukrainian-Jewish relations.
June 30, 1941-July 26, 1944 – Lviv is occupied by Hitler’s Germany. So-called Aktion Reinhard – the Nazi code name for operations to round up Jews to send to concentration and death camps – begin immediately. Over the next two years, some 12 Aktion Reinhard occurred in Lviv, decimating the city’s Jewish population.
July 27, 1944 – Lviv again falls under Soviet rule.
May 7, 1945 – Germany signs the document of unconditional surrender in Reims, France. All told, the Nazis imprisoned and exterminated an estimated 9 million people, 6 million of whom were Jews.
Kyiv Post staff writer Natalia A. Feduschak can be reached at [email protected]
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UKRAINE’S VANISHED JEWS
Part 1 (June 24): Boris Orych and western Ukraine Jews
Part 2 (July 1): The killing grounds
Part 3 (July 8): Surviving the Holocaust in Lviv.
Part 4 (July 15): Saving Jewish heritage
Part 5 (July 22): Reconciliation?
