The
Lemberg Ghetto (also known as
Lwów Ghetto and
Lvov Ghetto, ) was a
ghetto in the city of
Lwów, in
German-occupied Poland (now
Lviv in
Ukraine), one of the largest
ghettos established by
German Nazi authorities in the
General Government created in 1939 on the territory of the
Second Polish Republic. Once holding over 120,000 people, killings and deportations to
death camps had reduced the Jewish population of the city to a few hundreds by the end of the war.
Before the war
On the eve of
World War II, the city of
Lwów had the third-largest
Jewish population in Poland, after
Warsaw and
Łódź, 99,600 in 1931 (32%) by confession criteria (percent of people of
Jewish faith) and numbering 75,300 (24%) by language criteria (percent of people speaking
Yiddish or
Hebrew as their
mother tongue), according to
Polish official census. 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 and
Hasidim,
Zionists, the Labour
Bund, and
communists. Assimilated Jews constituted a significant part of Lwów's Polish
intelligentsia and academical elites, including such notable ones as Marian Auerbach, Maurycy Allerhand and many others, and greatly contributed to Lwów's cultural center status.
WWII begins: Under Soviet control
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 further to about 200,000 individuals, as it absorbed an influx of refugees fleeing eastward from the Nazi-occupied 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 Nazi conquest and Pogroms
Main articles: Lviv pogroms and The Lviv pogroms controversy (1941)
As part of the Operation Barbarossa campaign against the USSR, the German army entered Lwów on June 30, 1941.
Immediately after the Germans entered the city, Einsatzgruppen and civilian collaborators organized a pogrom against the Jews. Some, mostly Ukrainian scholars, argue that this was in retaliation for the NKVD prisoner massacres of 2000 to approximately 7000 prisoners (including Polish, Jewish and Ukrainian intellectuals, political activists, and convicted common criminals) at Lwów's three prisons (Brygidki prison, Łąckiego street prison and Zamarstynowska street prison). According to Ukrainian scholars 75-80% of these victims were Ukrainian 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 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 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 Nazi-hunter Simon Wiesenthal 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.
Notes
References
Aharon Weiss, Encyclopaedia of the Holocaust vol. 3, pp. 928–931. Map, photos
Filip Friedman, Zagłada Żydów lwowskich (Extermination of the Jews of Lwów) - online in Polish, Ukrainian and Russian
Further reading
Marek Herman, From the Alps to the Red Sea. Tel Aviv: Hakibbutz Hameuchad Publishers and Beit Lohamei Haghetaot, 1985. pp. 14–60
David Kahane, Lvov Ghetto Diary. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1990. ISBN 0-87023-726-8 (Published in Hebrew as Yoman getto Lvov, Jerusalem:Yad Vashem, 1978)
Dr Filip Friedman, Zagłada Żydów lwowskich, Centralna Żydowska Komisja Historyczna, Centralny Komitet Żydów Polskich, Nr 4, Łódź 1945
Weiss, Jakob, The Lemberg Mosaic. New York : Alderbrook Press, 2010
External links
US Holocaust Museum information on Lviv
Database of names from the Lviv Ghetto
Dr Filip Fiedman, :pl:Filip Friedman
Category:Lemberg Ghetto
Category:History of Lviv
Category:The Holocaust in Poland
