Lwów Ghetto - AbsoluteAstronomy.com

The Lvov Ghetto or the Lwów Ghetto (also known as Lviv or Lemberg Ghetto) was a World War II ghetto set up in the city of Lwów (now Lviv

Lviv

Lviv is a city in western Ukraine. The city is regarded as one of the main cultural centres of today's Ukraine and historically has also been a major Polish and Jewish cultural center, as Poles and Jews were the two main ethnicities of the city until the outbreak of World War II and the following...

, Ukraine

Ukraine

Ukraine is a country in Eastern Europe. It has an area of 603,628 km², making it the second largest contiguous country on the European continent, after Russia...

) on the territory of Nazi-administered General Government

General Government

The General Government was an area of Second Republic of Poland under Nazi German rule during World War II; designated as a separate region of the Third Reich between 1939–1945...

in German-occupied Poland. It was one of the largest Jewish ghettos established by Nazi Germany

Nazi Germany

Nazi Germany , also known as the Third Reich , but officially called German Reich from 1933 to 1943 and Greater German Reich from 26 June 1943 onward, is the name commonly used to refer to the state of Germany from 1933 to 1945, when it was a totalitarian dictatorship ruled by...

after the joint Nazi-Soviet invasion of Poland

Poland

Poland , officially the Republic of Poland , is a country in Central Europe bordered by Germany to the west; the Czech Republic and Slovakia to the south; Ukraine, Belarus and Lithuania to the east; and the Baltic Sea and Kaliningrad Oblast, a Russian exclave, to the north...

. The city was a home to over 120,000 Jews before the outbreak of World War II

World War II

World War II, or the Second World War , was a global conflict lasting from 1939 to 1945, involving most of the world's nations—including all of the great powers—eventually forming two opposing military alliances: the Allies and the Axis...

in 1939, and by the time the Nazis occupied the city in 1941 that number had increased to over 220,000 Jews, since Jews fled for their lives from Nazi-controlled western Poland into the then relative safety of Soviet-controlled eastern Poland, which included Lwow (Lvov). The ghetto, set up in the second half of 1941 after the Germans arrived, was liquidated in June 1943 with all its inhabitants who survived prior killings, sent to their deaths in cattle trucks at Bełżec extermination camp and the Janowska concentration camp

Janowska concentration camp

Janowska was a Nazi German labor, transit and concentration camp established September 1941 in occupied Poland on the outskirts of Lwów...

Before the war

On the eve of World War II

World War II

, the city of Lwów had the third-largest Jewish

History of the Jews in Poland

The history of the Jews in Poland dates back over a millennium. For centuries, Poland was home to the largest and most significant Jewish community in the world. Poland was the centre of Jewish culture thanks to a long period of statutory religious tolerance and social autonomy. This ended with the...

population in Poland, after Warsaw

Warsaw

Warsaw is the capital and largest city of Poland. It is located on the Vistula River, roughly from the Baltic Sea and from the Carpathian Mountains. Its population in 2010 was estimated at 1,716,855 residents with a greater metropolitan area of 2,631,902 residents, making Warsaw the 10th most...

and Łódź, 99,600 in 1931 (32%) by confession criteria (percent of people of Jewish faith

Judaism

Judaism ) is the "religion, philosophy, and way of life" of the Jewish people...

) and numbering 75,300 (24%) by language criteria (percent of people speaking Yiddish

Yiddish language

Yiddish is a High German language of Ashkenazi Jewish origin, spoken throughout the world. It developed as a fusion of German dialects with Hebrew, Aramaic, Slavic languages and traces of Romance languages...

or Hebrew

Hebrew language

Hebrew is a Semitic language of the Afroasiatic language family. Culturally, is it considered by Jews and other religious groups as the language of the Jewish people, though other Jewish languages had originated among diaspora Jews, and the Hebrew language is also used by non-Jewish groups, such...

as their mother tongue

First language

A first language is the language a person has learned from birth or within the critical period, or that a person speaks the best and so is often the basis for sociolinguistic identity...

), according to Polish official census

Polish census of 1931

The Polish census of 1931 or Second General Census in Poland was the second census taken in Poland, performed on December 9, 1931 by the Main Bureau of Statistics...

. Assimilated Jews, those who perceived themselves as Poles of Jewish faith, constitute the discrepancy between those numbers. By 1939, those numbers were, respectively, several thousand greater. Jews were notably involved in the city's renowned textile industry and had established a thriving center of education and culture, with a wide range of religious and secular political activity including parties and youth movements of the orthodox

Orthodox Judaism

Orthodox Judaism , is the approach to Judaism which adheres to the traditional interpretation and application of the laws and ethics of the Torah as legislated in the Talmudic texts by the Sanhedrin and subsequently developed and applied by the later authorities known as the Gaonim, Rishonim, and...

and Hasidim

Hasidic Judaism

Hasidic Judaism or Hasidism, from the Hebrew —Ḥasidut in Sephardi, Chasidus in Ashkenazi, meaning "piety" , is a branch of Orthodox Judaism that promotes spirituality and joy through the popularisation and internalisation of Jewish mysticism as the fundamental aspects of the Jewish faith...

, Zionists

Zionism

Zionism is a Jewish political movement that, in its broadest sense, has supported the self-determination of the Jewish people in a sovereign Jewish national homeland. Since the establishment of the State of Israel, the Zionist movement continues primarily to advocate on behalf of the Jewish state...

, the Labour Bund, and communists

Communism

Communism is a social, political and economic ideology that aims at the establishment of a classless, moneyless, revolutionary and stateless socialist society structured upon common ownership of the means of production...

. Assimilated Jews constituted a significant part of Lwów's Polish intelligentsia

Intelligentsia

The intelligentsia is a social class of people engaged in complex, mental and creative labor directed to the development and dissemination of culture, encompassing intellectuals and social groups close to them...

and academical elites, including such notable ones as Marian Auerbach, Maurycy Allerhand and many others, and greatly contributed to Lwów's cultural center status.

Soviet occupation zone at the onset of World War II

Three weeks after the outbreak of the war, the city, along with the rest of eastern Galicia, was annexed by the Soviet Union under the terms of the Ribbentrop-Molotov pact. Under the Soviets, Lwów's Jewish population swelled to about 200,000-220,000 persons, as it absorbed an influx of refugees fleeing eastward from the Nazi-occupied western part of Poland (Stefan Szende gives the number of 180,000 Jews). Under Soviet rule some of Lwów's Jews were repressed along with the rest of population. Those residents deported deep into the USSR were almost the only ones to survive the Holocaust

The Holocaust

The Holocaust , also known as the Shoah , was the genocide of approximately six million European Jews and millions of others during World War II, a programme of systematic state-sponsored murder by Nazi...

The Nazi conquest and Pogroms

The German army

Wehrmacht

The Wehrmacht – from , to defend and , the might/power) were the unified armed forces of Nazi Germany from 1935 to 1945. It consisted of the Heer , the Kriegsmarine and the Luftwaffe .-Origin and use of the term:...

entered the Soviet occupation zone

Soviet occupation of Poland

Soviet occupation of Poland can refer to*Period from 1939 to 1941 - see Occupation of East Poland by Soviet Union*Period from 1945-1989 - see Northern Group of Forces...

on June 22, 1941 under the codename Operation Barbarossa

Operation Barbarossa

Operation Barbarossa was the code name for Germany's invasion of the Soviet Union during World War II that began on 22 June 1941. Over 4.5 million troops of the Axis powers invaded the USSR along a front., the largest invasion in the history of warfare...

and a week later, on June 30, 1941 overrun the city of Lwów. When the Germans took over the city, the SS paramilitary death squads

Einsatzgruppen

Einsatzgruppen were SS paramilitary death squads that were responsible for mass killings, typically by shooting, of Jews in particular, but also significant numbers of other population groups and political categories...

organized the first pogrom

Lviv pogroms

The Lviv pogroms were two massacres of Jews living in and near in the city of Lwów, the occupied Republic of Poland , that took place from 30 June to 2 July and 25–29 July 1941 during World War II. 700 Jews were killed in the rioting by some Ukrainian nationalists and Ukrainian militia and further...

against the Jews with the aid of Ukrainian militia

Ukrainian Auxiliary Police

The Ukrainische Hilfspolizei was a German mobile police force that operated in the General Government beginning on July 27, 1941. The total number enlisted numbered slightly more than 35,000. 6,000 of them - including 120 low-level officers - served in the District of Galicia...

and local civilians. Some, mostly Ukrainian scholars, argue that the attack was in retaliation for the NKVD prisoner massacres of 2,000 to approximately 7,000 prisoners (including Polish, Jewish and Ukrainian intellectuals, political activists, and convicted common criminals) at Lwów's three prisons (Brygidki prison

Brygidki

Brygidki is the building of a former Bridgettine nunnery in Lviv, Ukraine. It was founded in 1614 at the behest of Anna Fastkowska and Anna Poradowska for girls from noble families. After the Partition of Poland the Austrian administration decided to secularise the convent...

, Łąckiego street prison and Zamarstynowska street prison). According to Ukrainian scholars 75-80% of these victims were Ukrainian. The surviving Jews, eye witnesses victims of the event mostly present a different point of view in their memoirs. Keeping in mind of course that of the entire population of pre-invasion Jewish Lwow estimated to be a figure of about 150,000, under 1000 survived.

Although Jews had also been among the victims of the massacre perpetrated by the NKVD and Soviets in retreat, they were collectively accused as a group by the Nazis of having somehow been responsible for it. One theory advanced to "justify" the ensuing anti-Jewish riot commonly known as the "Prison Massacre" and mass murder of several thousand Jews is that the Ukrainians had retaliated against them "because some Jews had welcomed the Soviet occupation." Ukrainian scholars have posited other theories and this is just one among many as to why the Prison Massacre of the Jews occurred.

However, according to 100% of the Jewish survivors of the Lemberg Ghetto, eye witnesses to the circumstances, the sole reason for the so-called Prison Massacre was hundreds of years of pent-up Ukrainian hatred for the Jewish population that had been steeping from the days when Ukrainians were still Ruthenians, subject to the authority of the Kaiser Franz Josef I, and Lemberg was the capital city of the province of Galicia in the former Austro-Hungarian Empire. They allege that the murder of the Ukrainian prisoners, and the shifting of blame to the Jews was merely a pretext with reasonably foreseeable consequences (i.e. to advance what would soon be called the "Final Solution"), but instead craftily set in motion utilizing the nationalistic Ukrainians as "tools" (or in view of the crimes committed against the innocent Jewish civilian population, "accessories,") after the Nazi invasion.

During this invasion, according to Jewish eye witnesses as well as evidentiary photographs that have surfaced, Ukrainian Nationalists marched side-by-side with the Einsatzgruppen "C" and Wehrmacht "Army Group South" when they entered Lvov (as the Soviets retreated, note the use of the Sovietized name of the city, still not yet technically under German control as of the last days of June, 1941). Ukrainian nationalists, UNO, and civilians welcomed the invaders. Some were bearing garlands, waving the Ukrainian Trizub along with the Nazi standard. The Ukrainians (civilians and "nationalists" alike) greeted the invaders with open arms, banners, and floral arrangements. Men displayed a raised arm "Heil Hitler" salute, while the Nazis received embraces and kisses from young women dressed in traditional Ukrainian folk outfits.

The Soviets themselves as well as other witnesses (mostly the few surviving Jews), notably Rabbi David Kahane, author of Lvov Ghetto Diary and former member of the Committee on Religious Affairs of the Lemberg Judenrat, have asserted that it was actually the Nazis themselves that perpetrated the massacre, and then blamed it on the NKVD. But as the pretext went, after filming the devastation they themselves had inflicted, used the "prison massacre" as a pretext to set up the Jews of Lwow; in effect to provide a "cause" for the Ukrainians to vent their hatred. Thus, if we accept the Soviet and Jewish victims' version of the events rather than the version advanced by the Ukrainians (who were the actual rioters and perpetrated the murders), it was the Nazis who "gave license" to the UNO, the Ukrainian nationalists, the Ukrainian militia (soon to become the Ukrainian Auxiliary Police), and Ukrainian citizenry (identified simply by yellow armbands), to conduct a full blown massacre in which at least 2000 Jewish men were killed. Note that at this early stage of the (recently named) "Holocaust by Bullets" in Ukraine (technically General Gouvernment Galicia beginning in August, 1941), women were still only harassed and beaten. The outright massacre of Jewish men, women, and children would soon follow (see Wikipedia article "The Final Solution," specifically the section on General Gouvernment Galicia).

A second pogrom

Pogrom

A pogrom is a form of violent riot, a mob attack directed against a minority group, and characterized by killings and destruction of their homes and properties, businesses, and religious centres...

took place in the last days of July 1941 and was named the "Petlura Days" after the assassinated Ukrainian leader and pogromist Symon Petliura. This pogrom was organized by the Nazis, but carried out by the Ukrainians, as a prologue to the total annihilation of the Jewish population of Lwów. Somewhere in the neighborhood of between 5000 -7000 Jews were brutally beaten to death or murdered outright in this massacre. In addition, some 3,000 persons, mostly Jews, were executed in the municipal stadium by the German military.

The Ghetto

On November 8, 1941, the Germans established a ghetto which they called Jüdisches Wohnbezirk in the northern part of Lwów. All of the city's Jews were ordered to move there by December 15, 1941 and all Poles and Ukrainian were to move out. Vicinity which was designated to form the Jewish quarter was Zamarstynów (today Замарстинів). Before the war it was one of the poorest and pitiable built suburbs of Lwów. German police also began a series of "selections" in an operation called "Action under the bridge" - 5,000 elderly and sick Jews were selected and shot as they crossed under the rail bridge on Pełtewna Street (which was called bridge of death by Jews), while they were moving into the ghetto. By December, between 110,000 and 120,000 Jews were living in the Lemberg Ghetto. The living conditions in the overcrowded ghetto were extremely poor. For example provided food rations were estimated to equal 10% of German and 50% of Ukrainian or Polish rations.

The Germans established a Jewish police force called the Jüdischer Ordnungsdienst Lemberg wearing dark blue Polish police uniforms but with the Polish insignia replaced by a Magen David

Star of David

The Star of David, known in Hebrew as the Shield of David or Magen David is a generally recognized symbol of Jewish identity and Judaism.Its shape is that of a hexagram, the compound of two equilateral triangles...

and the letters J.O.L. in various positions on their uniform. They were given rubber truncheons. Their ranks numbered from 500 to 750 policemen. The Jewish police force answered to the Jewish National city council known as the Judenrat, which in turn answered to the Gestapo. They served under duress as did their Polish and Ukrainian counterparts.

The Lemberg Ghetto was one of the first to have Jews transported to the death camps as part of Aktion Reinhard. Between March 16 and April 1, 1942, 15,000 Jews were taken to the Kleparów railway station and deported to the Belzec

Belzec extermination camp

Belzec, Polish spelling Bełżec , was the first of the Nazi German extermination camps created for implementing Operation Reinhard during the Holocaust...

extermination camp. Following these initial deportations, and death by disease and random shootings, around 86,000 Jews officially remained in the ghetto, though there were many more not recorded. During this period, many Jews were also forced to work for the Wehrmacht and the ghetto's German administration, especially in the nearby Janowska labor camp. On June 24–25, 1942, 2,000 Jews were taken to the labor camp; only 120 were used for forced labor, and all of the others were shot.

Between August 10–31, 1942, the "Great Aktion" was carried out, where between 40,000 and 50,000 Jews were rounded up, gathered at transit point placed in Janowska camp and then deported to Belzec. Many who were not deported, including local orphans and hospital inpatients, were shot. On September 1, 1942, the Gestapo hanged the head of Lwów’s Judenrat

Judenrat

Judenräte were administrative bodies during the Second World War that the Germans required Jews to form in the German occupied territory of Poland, and later in the occupied territories of the Soviet Union It is the overall term for the enforcement bodies established by the Nazi occupiers to...

and members of the ghetto's Jewish police force on balconies of Judenrat's building at Łokietka street and Hermana street corner. Around 65,000 Jews remained while winter approached with no heating or sanitation, leading to an outbreak of typhus.

Between January 5–7, 1943, another 15,000-20,000 Jews, including the last members of the Judenrat, were shot outside of the town. After this aktion in January 1943 Judenrat was dissolved, that what remained of the ghetto was renamed Judenlager Lemberg (Jewish Camp Lwów), thus formally redesigned as labor camp with about 12,000 legal Jews, able to work in German war industry and several thousands illegal Jews (mainly women, children and elderly) hiding in it.

In the beginning of June 1943 Germans decided to finally end the existence of the Jewish quarter and its inhabitants. As Nazis entered the Ghetto they met some sporadic acts of armed resistance, but most of the Jews were trying to hide themselves in earlier prepared hideouts (so called bunkers). In effect many buildings were suffused with gasoline and burned in order to "flush out" Jews from their hiding places. Some Jews managed to escape or to conceal themselves in the sewer system.

By the time that the Soviet Red Army entered Lwów on July 26, 1944, only a few hundred Jews remained in the city. Number varies from 200 to 900 (823 according to data of Jewish Provisional Committee in Lwów, from 1945).

Among its notable inhabitants was Chaim Widawski

Chaim Widawski

Chaim Widawski was a popular Zionist activist in the Łódź Ghetto during World War II.After the German takeover of Poland, the Nazis confiscated personal radios from Jews and Poles, and their possession was made punishable by death...

, who disseminated news about the war picked up with an illegal radio. Nazi-hunter Simon Wiesenthal

Simon Wiesenthal

Simon Wiesenthal KBE was an Austrian Holocaust survivor who became famous after World War II for his work as a Nazi hunter....

was one of the best-known Jewish inhabitants of Lemberg Ghetto to survive the war (as his memoirs (The Executioners Among Us) indicate, he was saved from execution by a Ukrainian policeman), though he was later transported to a concentration camp, rather than remaining in the ghetto.

External links

US Holocaust Museum information on Lviv
Database of names from the Lviv Ghetto
Dr Filip Fiedman, :pl:Filip Friedman

The source of this article is wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. The text of this article is licensed under the GFDL.

Before the war

Soviet occupation zone at the onset of World War II

The Nazi conquest and Pogroms

The Ghetto

Further reading

External links