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UCSB Oral History Project
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This is a travelogue by Harold Marcuse (see his homepage), a 41 year old history professor from California, who spent 6 days in Lviv with 78-year-old Nina Morecki, a Holocaust survivor born there in 1920, and her 49 year old American daughter, Carol Morecki-Oberg.
Please note: this is a draft version, put on the web in May 2000 by special request. It was written in August and Sept. 1999.
The idea to take this trip didn't come until early June, after an oral history videotaping session with Nina. Nina was 18 and had lived in the city all her life when the Soviets occupied it in 1939. Her father, who owned an estate at Soluky, about 10 km. west of town, and was running a soap and candle factory in Lvov that his wife had inherited, was expropriated and imprisoned as a capitalist. He was deported to Siberia, where he died under unknown circumstances. Nina's plans to study medicine in Italy or Palestine-Jews weren't allowed to study medicine in Poland-had to be dropped. She and her mom had cordial relations to the Soviet officer quartered with them, and he offered to take them along when the Germans invaded in June 1941. They decided not to go, and thus began Nina's odyssey through ghetto, concentration camp and undercover work in a German post office for the Polish underground. (For her story in detail, see the web site we're creating: www.history.ucsb.edu/projects/holocaust.) Anyway, in June my students working on the project found a 1938 Polish city map of Lvov in UCSB's map library, and Nina simply blossomed showing us her old addresses and describing the houses, attractions, other tenants, etc.
To make a long story short, I suggested the trip, Nina's younger daughter agreed to come along, and we started the process of getting visas and preparing for a trip behind what used to be the "iron curtain." The web was our first stop, where esp. the Brama web site got us started. We later purchased the relevant Lonely Planet guidebook as well. Calling the hotels in Lviv for the officially stamped confirmation of reservations wasn't a problem-both the Grand and George hotels had English speaking receptionists and faxed the documents to us. We used express mail to expedite our tourist visa applications (cost: $75 each). Since we were on such a tight schedule the Ukrainian embassy in Washington turned them around in 6 days instead of the usual nine, getting them back to us with a couple of days to spare. (Click for more details on travel preparations.)
We flew British Airways from Los Angeles to London to Warsaw. The Air Ukraine connection from Warsaw was our first concrete indication that this trip was going to be something a bit out of the ordinary. It was on a small Russian-built 24-seater that was, well, different than the smaller US-built city-hoppers we are used to. It was a good bit roomier and more tastefully designed, with round, porthole-like curtained windows, thin seat backs, and tastefully patterned wall-to-wall carpeting. It didn't have amenities like seat back trays or air jets, and FAA regulations (stow this, stow that, listen here, listen there) clearly didn't apply. On board were mostly business people, quite a few Americans and other, perhaps Polish English-speakers, including a lady with laptop and cell phone who borrowed our Time magazine. It was too loud on the sturdily built prop jet to talk, so we dozed before and after the Turkish-style coffee and layered cookies were served. I figured out how the digital video camera worked, and filmed a little of the farming and settlement patterns out the window. The Lviv airport was beautifully renovated. It reminded me of Berlin-Tempelhof, built by Hitler in the 1930s, but smaller and less pretentious. We later learned that it had been freshly spruced up for last May's meeting of eastern European heads of state, also attended by Hillary Clinton.
In the small gate waiting area we filled out customs forms and purchased the mandatory health insurance for non-former-Soviet bloc citizens ($4/week), then proceeded through the border authorities. Our guard x-ed out the blank spaces on the form with a flourish, poked around in my bag a bit, and let me start counting my currency for him before waving us through. This was a far cry from the border guard antics crossing into the socialist bloc before 1989-I was almost nostalgic.
We were fortunate to be met by a local resident. One of my students had worked in Ternopil, Ukraine, for a Christian mission. Her friend, who was still in Ternopil, *we got Sasha, the son of an English teacher who's friends with the head of the mission organization in Ternopil. Sasha, a 23-year-old Ph.D. candidate in Lviv's Forestry University, was there to pick us up with his friend Igor, who has a VW van for his shoe-selling business at a local bazaar-type open air market. Sasha had been in North Carolina and Georgia with "Helping Hands," a primarily Baptist/Pentecostal group. Lots of religious revivalism in Ukraine-apparently with outside help. In spite of his work with the organization, Sasha had never been to church, and wasn't interested in starting. Sasha's father is vice president of Forestry University. In Soviet times he was a professor, did projects like setting up "lines" to get tree trunks out of the Carpathian mountains-some are still in use, Sasha says. Then the father moved up to dean, now VP. So I'd guess they're fairly well off. The father makes about $400/month, the mother $150. Sasha is teaching a university course now, at $100/month. (By way of comparison, my wife made $1100/month net as a lecturer teaching one course at UCSB last spring.) Such docents need a one-year post-graduate course of study to become a "specialist." Sasha is writing his dissertation on the ecological impacts of logging in the Carpathian mountains-following fittingly in his father's footsteps, but with a "green" post-production-oriented communist twist. He'll need about 3 years beyond his first post-grad year in order to get his Ph.D.
Anyway, back to the airport. The various forms of currency equivalency and conversion will take some getting used to-the fixed currency exchange rates have some loopholes. Tourists sometimes get charged a special rate, e.g. $20 from the airport, while going to it costs only the "native" rate of 20H ($5). Our hotel room without bath cost $23/night, a room with bath a more western (but still cheap) $75. Dinner for five at a small restaurant just off Prospekt Svobody (the main drag) was a ridiculous 41 Hryvny total, about $9.25. From one of the ubiquitous exchange booths, often just yards from each other, the rate varies about 2-3% (say 4.40 to 4.55H/$). They are supposed to set a rate in the morning and are not allowed to change it all day. During our week in Lviv at the hotel bank it went from 4.40 to 4.65, then back to 4.55 on the last day. That would work out to be a 160% annual inflation rate (15/450 times 52 weeks, or 1.6 times its original value). They post a selling price for dollars, but don't sell them. And as we found out on our last day, late in the day the exchanges do run out of Hryvny.
Let me describe our hotel, the Zhorzh (George). Built in 1856, it has a distinctively 19th century feel. The neo-Baroque staircase is quite impressive, with colored ersatz-marble columns, mirrors, leaded and colored art-deco windows, geometric ceramic tiles under sometimes threadbare oriental rugs, and ornate railings, but still not as grand as the hype in the guidebook led me to expect. Most visible surfaces are well painted, but it is not hard to find peeling paint (between the double room doors, on the balconies). It is fun being able to stay at such a patrician hotel at reasonable prices! The furniture is plain mass-produced 50s style, probably made in the 60s or 70s. It's serviceable, if completely drab and by no means elegant. The rooms have Persian carpets and wallpaper patterns stenciled onto plaster walls-mine a tastefully abstract holly-leafy design in shades of green, framed by a band along the top and corners. My room had a radio that didn't work-when Nina and Carol had to change to a room without bath on the last day we found that for only 10H more you can get a TV that doesn't work instead. There is a sink in the room; the shower on my floor didn't work, so I had to get the key from the front desk, then go up to the third. Not very convenient, but I got a better look at the goings-on in the hotel that way.
The breakfasts are sumptuous, in a luxurious Chinese tea room. Each day they served something different: fried, boiled or scrambled eggs, a delicious doughy omelet, English-muffin-sized doughy disks filled with sweet ricotta cheese and fried in oil, kasha porridge. Right after breakfast we were approached in the lobby by a young woman selling hand-embroidered blouses, tablecloth-napkin sets, and an assortment of dolls. She couldn't sell her wares in the lobby here, she told us, in contrast to the Hotel Dnistr, the Soviet-era noble hotel, which had just been fixed up for Hillary et al, where she could set up a table. So we took her upstairs, and I bought a blouse for my six-year-old. Rozlyn's price went quickly from 80H to 50 ($11), but she didn't want to go lower, so I left it at that. I later saw that the 80 could be bargained to 40 at the souvenir market off the north end of Svobody, but bought another one from Rozlyn a few days later anyway, since we had an opportunity to talk and she told me her family story. She has a 5-year-old, so I also found a thankful taker for some of my crayons and children's gifts.
Rozlyn's story [41]
Nina was anxious to get going and see her childhood home at Kopernika 10, just around the corner from the hotel. On the way we stopped to look into an interior courtyard. It was quite peaceful, although some war (?) damage was still visible. Laundry was hanging from window racks, a few cars were parked at the sides, English-language graffiti adorned the walls, a fire crackled under a pot of tar, stirred by a fellow fixing a roof.
At Kopernika 10 we immediately got into conversations with two young women taking a cigarette break on the 2nd floor courtyard balcony. They work for a US AID project bringing Land-O'Lakes consulting expertise in agribusiness (production efficiency and marketing are the two main areas) to Ukraine. In two months the two-year project will end; Oksana hopes the possibility of a second one will come through. She's studied Ukrainian language and literature, with an English minor. She spent 5 months in Minnesota with LoL, spoke perfect idiomatic English. Her friend, who had to go inside for something, also spoke quite well. Their jobs, in a modern office, are probably top-notch for 20-somethings in Ukraine. She chatted quite knowledgeable with me about university teaching, US AID, and Ukrainian politics and economics, tourism.
There are fewer cars on the streets these days, she said, because the price of gas just quadrupled, since Russia no longer sells at preferred prices. A few days later Udo, the German red cross volunteer, had a different explanation: it was a manufactured crisis, designed to delegitimize the current government right before the elections. At any rate, Oksana also suggested that that was the reason for the dollar's present rise. The presidential elections are at the end of September. A social democrat (Kutshman) is now in office. His party is followed by the communists (20+%) and Ukrainian nationalists (10-20%, depending on region). Sasha called them "Nazis," said they're stronger here in west Ukraine, while the communists ("Nazis on the left") are stronger near Kiev and in the east. Did Oksana like elections? Yes, clearly, although candidates made far more promises than they kept. Just like everywhere else, I replied. She impressed me as far more knowledgeable, mature, self-confident-worldly-than her peers in most places around the world.
For Nina the tour of her old house-she was about 15 when they left in 1935-must have been a confusing rush of emotions. Her top-floor apartment had been subdivided into 3 units-all very different looking today. So different, in fact, that the jolt experienced by so many Holocaust survivors who returned after the war to find their furniture still in the rooms and their pictures on the walls of the new "owners'" apartment, didn't hit her. Two reasons, I guess: for one, she had already been back in 1945-46 and probably experienced that jolt then, and her family had moved out of this particular apartment long before the war. Nina's later reaction at the house on Platz Strzeletsky, where the family lived when the Germans came, was quite different.
With Sasha we headed past the rynek (main city square) to one of two synagogues his British friend had told him about. (He hadn't known anything about the history of Jewish Lvov himself, even though six decades earlier a third of the city's population had been Jewish.) Parked in front of the city hall were several diplomats' cars: the latest model Volvos and BMWs, a few luxury VW models, and quite a few Russian Volgas and Ladas. Sasha explained that the latter go by model numbers instead of the usual western names with marketing appeal (Intrepid, Prelude, etc.): "7th" had the most horsepower, "11th" had a sleeker profile and leather upholstery. We took a right turn at the statue of Ivan Franko, the translator and printer of the first Russian bible, known as the "Russian Gutenberg." Another jog to the right took us along a quite impressive section of the old city wall, to a small empty lot on a side street. Nestled in the back were the ruins of a synagogue destroyed in 1942. A marble plaque in Ukrainian and English marked the site, as did some graffiti, including a swastika. The plaque, similar to several others we would see in the coming days, was erected by foreign Jewish organizations after Ukrainian independence in 1993.
We then went back to Prospekt Svobody to catch a private bus to the Mihnovskyh St. synagogue to the west of the center, the only one of 45-50 Jewish houses of worship in the city to escape complete destruction by the Nazis. (The German occupiers had used it as a stable.) Svobody-Liberation Boulevard-received its name in 1993. During the Polish years from 1920 to World War II it was named after Hetman, a 17th century Polish general, then Adolf-Hitler-Strasse, then after 1945 Stalinallee, and after Stalin's fall from grace in 1956, Lenin Blvd. A lot of history resides in a name!
It was just starting to rain, so most of the buses were crowded, but eventually a #75 with a couple of empty seats came by. The private buses cost .80H each, as compared to the .30H of the public streetcars. The buses can be flagged down or asked to stop anywhere along their routes. You pass your fare forward to the driver, and your ticket and change are passed back to you. The driver does all this while navigating pedestrian-crowded cobblestone streets, shifting gears and answering passengers' questions, on this particular morning in a beginning rain.
The Mihnovskyh St. synagogue is only two tram stops from the main train station. It was a bustling construction site on the Friday afternoon we arrived, with a group of people clustered in the entryway, a table saw screeching in the courtyard, young female masons plastering the walls inside. Nina tried to communicate with an older man who spoke Yiddish, but not Polish. I tried German and could understand a little more, but we really didn't make much progress until we realized he could speak Ukrainian with Sasha, who would translate into English for us. The man had come to Lviv in 1946 after having spent time in Siberia. He was now one of the approximately twenty of Lviv's 5,500 Jews who actively prayed each morning and evening. He said that about 100 Jews came to synagogue for Friday shabbat services. When pushed, he said that he "assisted" at the services, but somehow (esp. given the condition of this sole remaining synagogue) I don't think there are organized services, much less an ordained rabbi, in Lviv.
The building, built in 1925, had impressive murals painted on the walls and ceiling. I could make out a few religious motifs, but mostly mythical beasts. The stained glass skylight was broken in a few places, lumber and Styrofoam insulation stacked everywhere, but we could see down from the gallery that there were seats around the bema. The renovation was being paid for by the Jewish "Joint" (Distribution Committee) in New York, an organization founded after WW2 to distribute German restitution funds (and private donations?). I'm sure this project is providing some badly needed jobs as well as rescuing a rate surviving relic of Lviv's once vibrant Jewish community. (Of about 150,000 prewar Jews, perhaps 200 had been able to survive in hiding. It's not known how many survived incognito and/or in emigration, as Nina had.
Our "guide" described to Sasha where the Sholem Aleichem society was, so that we could visit it later on. (I knew from a published bibliography that this organization had published brochures about Lvov's Jews during Nazi occupation in 1997 and 1998). We left to walk the mile or so to Shevchenka St. (formerly Janovska), were the Jewish cemetery and concentration camp had been. We stopped along the way at the rather desolate parklike playground of a kindergarten for a snack and a rest. The play equipment was gone, benches broken, and only a series of once-elaborate gatelike structures testified to the onetime existence of a wooden fence. Sasha said there are plenty of state-run kindergartens for all kids over 3. There is a demographic crisis in Ukraine, a low birth rate and high emigration. The population shrank from 4.4 to 4.2 millions (am I remembering the figures correctly?) over the past couple of years.
A quick personal anecdote about the new name of Janovska St.: Shevchenka. Somehow I had been under the impression that this national hero's name was the Ukrainian pronunciation of the Russian dissident poet Yevtuchenko, whose epic poem "Babi Yar" (name of a ravine near Kiev where 35,000 Jews were machine-gunned by Germans on Sept. 25 & 26, 1941), set to music by *Prokofiev, was well-known to me. I was surprised that the street could have been named after him during the Soviet era, and pushed Sasha on the point. Finally he replied: "Well, he was a hero, even if they didn't publish all of his works." Later, when I saw and deciphered the cyrillic spelling of the street name and realized it couldn't be Yevtuchenko, I asked Sasha again. He thought Yevtushenko might have been a famous soccer player, but had never heard of the writer. I'll have to check on the correct spelling. At any rate, given Sasha's solid educational background, I surmise that knowledge of the dissident writer had been quite effectively suppressed! Lviv's famous son poet Shevchenko, the Ukrainian hero with a huge statue on Svobody, a large street and a boulevard (behind the Zhorzh hotel) named after him, is known to everyone!
The Jewish cemetery was both interesting and disappointing. You could see modern graves over the low wall, and there was a dead cat on the sidewalk near the entrance where Sasha bought fresh flowers from one of the old sidewalk saleswomen to lay on his grandfather's grave. This is a mixed Jewish-Christian cemetery, the oldest graves being from the late 1940s near the entrance (Cyrillic inscriptions, a very few in Hebrew). The further in you go there are a few Christian graves interspersed, then only Christian ones further back. It is common to either etch in or include a small enamel portrait of the deceased on the headstone.
When I filmed up and down the main avenue of the cemetery, a man on a bench commented that my video camera looked just like a regular camera-at least that's what I took him to mean. We found one interesting headstone from a Jewish woman who died in 1958 who had included the name of a relative who had died in 1942. Near the entrance was a small obelisk with an etched candle for the Jews who had been murdered in 1941-42. That would have included Nina's mother and siblings.
We left the cemetery the way we entered, and hiked around the outside and up Shevchenka to the former Janovska concentration camp. Sasha's retired uncle had once been a guard there, so Sasha was familiar with the place.
I was rather surprised to see, behind the high, barbed-wire topped walls, the dark and looming remains of a huge factory. A look at the Holocaust Atlas Map revealed that, indeed, a huge FF-controlled German Army Equipment Works (DAW) plant was there, with the concentration camp merely a small appendage on the far side. And, as we already knew from the map, it was next to a main railway trunk line. Looming blackened smokestacks, high brick walls with large boxy metal fans and equipment-nothing appeared to be running or even operational, but ominous nonetheless. We walked up the road to the entrance, where a guard in camouflage fatigues made it clear that we should not be there. The entrance, with a more recent girder-supported automatic gate, was at the same site between the plant and the prison as the original concentration camp entrance. It reminds me of the "Oswiencim Chemical Works" in former Auschwitz-Monowitz, the former Buna works of I.G. Farben, still producing chemicals as a government-run Polish factory, with huge red brick structures pocketed among more modern ones.
It was the end of the tram line 7, so we got on and rode back to Fedorov, the Russian Gutenberg, and walked to the hotel.
We had dinner-we were tired-at restaurant Stefanya, a little place at our end of Pr. Svobody, which Sasha claimed to have the best food for a reasonable price in all of Lviv. The menu had English translations (that gave us the courage to try a dinner on our own there later!); I took Sasha's recommendation and had the meat-filled blintzes (translated as pancakes) with mushroom gravy. There were really very good. Nina was very pleased with her fried chicken roll, Carol glad the French fried potato wedges were light and not too fatty.
Day 2 (written early in the morning of day 3).
These first two days have been so intense, I hardly know where to begin. Yesterday morning I took a good three hours to write up day one, and day two was also so full of impressions. It's such a godsend to have Sasha, who is feeling increasingly comfortable around us, and is, I think, getting something interesting out of our questions and program.
After my long journal-writing session (what a great way to digest and make the most of one's trip!-but only possible when not traveling with kids!!). I went down to the desk to get the key for the hotel shower one floor up. Just a small tiled bathroom with a sink, small table in a corner, radiator in another, and a hose-shower in the fourth. No wait, although someone had been in before me.
Carol had had difficulty adjusting to the time change, so when I knocked at 9:15 she was just getting up. I read some more in Leon Wells' book Janovska Road-more about that 16-year-old Holocaust survivor's memoir of Lvov some other time-and we had a late breakfast. Today it included watery sunny-side-up fried eggs. We made it down just in time to meet Sasha at 11.
We decided to walk to the 2nd synagogue, but when Sasha told us, as we walked by countless-truly!-wedding couples (those not driving were going to the *Mishkevysha monument across from the Zhorzh to have their pictures taken), that summer Saturdays are traditional wedding days, I suggested we go to Pototsky Palace on Kopernika instead, as the guidebook had said it was a popular wedding venue.
What a scene!
The street was already jammed with procession cars, the groom's usually decorated with two interlocking gold rings on the hood. At the palace itself there are at least 2 "chapels"-rooms where civil servants "register" the marriage. Sasha said the groom starts by decorating the car and driving to the bride's house to ask her parents if he can have her. Assuming a positive answer (not always a given, if the bride's parents know the groom is a deadbeat or drunk, for instance), they then drive to a place like Pototski to get "registered," go take pictures (monuments make popular backdrops, remember Lenin's tomb at the Kremlin!), then they would go to a church (the civil ceremony being the legally binding one-a legacy of socialism), and afterwards have a reception.
Well, if the bridal traffic on Kopernika had been hectic, Pototski was positively frenetic. Procession/entourage cars, piloted by testosterone-charged best men jockeying for position, gypsy children begging, street musicians performing, everyone trying to take pictures (finally I was only one among many with a video camera), wedding parties appearing from all sides with flowers and traditional bread cakes, the women, who usually dress quite fashionably, were really dressed to kill today. If very mini skirts or dress slits to the upper thigh are the norm, today they were slit up to the hip bone; if tight is the norm, today it was tight in velour or stretch material.
Anyway, we went inside and watched how the groups were essentially queuing up in the anterooms to register. I joined the other cameramen to film, but it was next to impossible-although chaos would give a better impression than a calm, smooth narrative.
Afterwards we went down Pr. Svobody, with a peek in the Grand Hotel on the way. At the far end in front of the opera house-which Sasha says is the third most beautiful in the world after Vienna and Odessa, we watched the kids driving around in those battery-powered plastic cars, near where you could get your picture taken in a stuffed animal jungle setting with the opera as a backdrop.
We browsed across the nearby souvenir market-Carol bought some jewelry, I a few carved wooden boxes that will make nice birthday party favors for my 6-year-old daughter's next party. The equivalent of $2-2.50 each, they are infinitely nicer than some K-Mart junk, and the people here do so need the money. The salespeople quoted prices that were 2H (50 cents, or 20%) below the sticker price, but weren't willing to bargain, even when I bought several.
[Here ends the typed in portion, about 1/7 of the total journal.
What follows is a tour I put together to submit to the Lonely Planet guidebook we used, but never got around to doing that.]
The first stop on the tour is contemporary Lviv's only functioning synagogue, on Minovskyh St.
It's a 10-15 min. walk, or take any tram (.30 H) from the main station two stops out, where some of them will turn right and continue down Vul. C. Gandery. You should walk forward down vul. Horodetska, crossing it and taking the first left turn (around a cathedral-like church) up vul. Minhovskyh. Just a few houses in on the right is the synagogue.
It was the only one of 45-50 Jewish houses of worship in the city to escape complete destruction by the German occupiers-they used it as a stable. In 1999 it was renovated with funds from the Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, an organization created in the 1950s to distribute the restitution and reparations funds to be paid by the West German government. Inside, the square sanctuary with an upstairs gallery for female worshippers has beautiful paintings on all four walls and the ceiling, with stained glass windows over the ark of the torah and in the central skylight. They show religious symbols and mythical beasts, as best as I could make out during construction. In 1999 about 20 Jews prayed here regularly, with about 100 coming to the main Sabbath services on Friday nights. (There are about 5,500 Jews in Lviv at the turn of the millennium.)
From here to the next stop you can continue up Mihnovskyh St. about 15min. walking, through a small park (a rather run-down child-care-center) and then out to the right to vul. Shevchenka. Go left down this large street, which was formerly called Janovska (after the town to which it leads). On the right is one of Lviv's largest cemeteries, which *used to be exclusively Jewish. Now the western side contains Jewish graves from after the war to the present, with a simple monument to the Jews murdered in 1941-43 near the entrance. If you want to visit it, go up vul. *Ghroshenka and enter on the left near vul. Gholoia. The Jewish graves are on the left, with the oldest ones closest to the entrance. After a while, they mingle and then give way to Soviet-style non-Jewish graves. To continue the tour, it's best to exit the cemetery as you came in and go back to Shevchenka, then continuing out of the city towards the west. (If you are starting the tour from the city center, you can catch tram #7 from near the Ivan Fedorov monument, and take it up Shevchenka to the terminal station just beyond the cemetery. Note that the #7 doesn't stop between Fedorov and well beyond the Opera house.)
You will come to a fork in the road where Shevchenka veers off to the left (about ¼ mile past the left fork is the Klepariv station, where Jews from the camp were loaded onto death center-bound trains. The station has a commemorative plaque erected in 1992). On the right fork looms what looks like a menacing, disused brick factory complex surrounded by high walls and rusting barbed wire. This is the former factory of the Deutsche Ausruestungswerke, the SS armaments production branch, where many of the Jews in the Janovska camp worked. A ramplike road off to the right leads up to the main entrance of the prison. Army fatigue wearing guards may saunter out to tell you to leave if you get too close. The Soviet-era steel gate that hangs from iron girders and opens with an electric motor closes the original concentration camp entrance, which was located between the concentration camp and the factory. Today that camp, built by Jews arrested from Lvov's streets in 1941, serves as a prison for Ukrainian criminals.
Once the guards have motioned you back down the side road leading to the entrance, you can continue on the street down the hill around to the right. This will be another 20 min. walk, but its historical importance is well worth it. On the right you will come to a monument just below the prison, marking the entrance to the "sands," an area where mass executions of prisoners from the camp were conducted. In 1943 a special prisoner squad was forced to exhume the mass graves and burn the remains of *200,000 people to destroy the evidence of Germany's hideous crimes before its armies retreated westward. Notice the gray steel gate behind the monument. It closes the entrance to the training ground for all of Ukraine's police dogs. Before 1998 one could still bribe one's way into the compound to visit the execution and grave site, but now the government is worried that people will find it scandalous that they are using this place of atrocity and mourning to train their canine squads, so even bribes no longer help. I visited the site in August 1999 with a woman who survived one such mass shooting, crawled from the corpses, fled into the woods, and managed to survive the war. Even she was not allowed to enter. The re-use of concentration camp sites as army training sites or prisons is not unique to the soviet bloc or the Ukraine-Dachau near Munich, Bergen-Belsen near Hannover, Neuengamme near Hamburg, Sachsenhausen and Ravensbrueck near Berlin, Buchenwald near Weimar all were used as prisons and army barracks after the war, many of them still serve that purpose in the 1990s.
From here you will walk back up the hill to the terminus of tram #7, or you can take the detour up the south fork of Shevchenka and visit the Klepariv station, which is worth seeing as an impressive train switching grounds in its own right.
The next stop on our tour will be the Krakovsky market, a huge open air and enclosed market that used to be Lvov's huge old Jewish cemetery. Nothing, I repeat nothing, marks its former function. If you can manage it, get off the tram where Shevchenka merges into Horudetska (or at the last stop before the opera, and backtrack a long block on foot). The market lies two blocks north of Shevchenka/Horudetska, east of Kleparivska St. If you are backtracking from the opera, you can go north on the newly renamed Sholem Aleichem St., which ends at a corner of the Krakovsky market at Rapoport St. Sholem Aleichem, by the way, was a famous *Yiddish Zionist writer, born in Lviv.
On Rapoport St. is a large brick hospital. Six-pointed stars of David in the brickwork testify to its origin in the 19th century as a Jewish hospital. It was set up because Jewish physicians were not permitted to practice in non-Jewish hospitals. (Non-Jews, on the other hand, often went to the Jewish hospital for care by its specialists.)
There is nothing "Jewish" to see at the Krakovsky market, at least I could find absolutely no trace of its heritage as a Jewish cemetery. Older people remembered seeing some gravestones near it in the 1980s, but even those have disappeared. You can quell your sorrow at this fact at Lviv's brewery on Kleparivska St. just north of the market. It used to be one of the three main breweries in the Soviet Union, but since the dissolution of that empire its captive market has disappeared, and the beer is now of mediocre quality. Still, the vaulted cellars are worth a peek. And the bustling Krakovsky market itself is well worth seeing, if for no other reason than as evidence of the present's ability to forget the horrible past.
The next stop on this tour would be the entrance to the ghetto (see the map) set up under German administration in September 1941. You can take any side street from the Krakovsky market east to 700 Years Lvov (700 Richchya Lvova) St., which is the continuation of Prospekt Svobody northward beyond the Opera house. Just after you go under the railroad bridge you will see a large monument on the right hand side. This contorted bronze figure, with one open palm stretched upward in an imploring gesture, the other fist raised in angry defiance, was erected by Lviv's Jews in 199*, without financial assistance from foreigners. A few private plaques along the sides were purchased by survivors to commemorate their murdered families. The ghetto extended two long blocks northward and about 1.* km eastward from here. There were about * square meters of enclosed living space per person. Aside from this monument, and before it was established, there was nothing to remember the history of this site, either. Some people say that the second Holocaust was the forgetting of the first.
Going back on 700 Years Lvov street to the outlying end of the tree-shaded open square across the street from the Hotel Lviv (a prefab concrete Soviet-era building), you will find the yellow-stucco building of the Sholem Aleichem society just off the northeastern corner of the square (on your left if you are going towards the city center). This is the vibrant center of contemporary Jewish life in Lviv, with its own library, kindergarten with a couple dozen youngsters, and Jewish social services. If you strike up a conversation with one of the people standing around outside or in (just ask something about Lviv's Jewish heritage; if they don't speak your language, they'll find someone who does), you can probably get someone to show you some of the handful of monuments to the dozens of destroyed synagogues and smaller houses of worship (beit midrash?) nearby. By the way, there is no discernible concern about security here, in contrast to the heavily guarded Jewish institutions in Germany. I would guess that this is because the lack of knowledge about Jews in Lviv is so complete that aggressive antisemitism isn't a problem yet.
Or you can go up vul. Syanska and across vul. Bohdana Khmelnytskoho, you will find a green square with a plaque-bearing boulder on the north side. Set in 199*, it tells that a "temple"-a particularly lavish synagogue looked down upon by orthodox Jews-was destroyed here in July 1941. It does not tell that this happened immediately upon entry of the German army into the city, nor that it was destroyed during a service, killing most of the worshippers. This area was the core of Jewish Lvov, although synagogues dotted the city. Sharp eyes will find other such plaques at empty lots and on tree lined squares throughout this quarter.
A final station on the tour of Jewish Lvov would be the crumbling foundations of one of the older* synagogues, not far from the Rynok. From the Rynok go east two blocks on vul. Ruska to the square with the Fedorov statue and turn right (southward), then right again. You will enter a small cobblestone street that bends around to the left along the inside of a preserved section of the medieval city wall (housing the museum of old arms, by the way). Go down the street and take the first right. About one block down there is a vacant lot on the right. At the back you'll find a plaque (erected 199*) commemorating the 192* synagogue. You can descend and climb among the rubble. When I was there in 1999 there was a swastika among the graffiti-probably more of an ignorant prank than a sign of serious antisemitism, but disheartening nonetheless.
Notes for Lonely Planet guidebook:
On p. 994, col. 2 top, changed the confusing sentence "which was nearly blown up by an undetonated bomb" to: "escaped destruction when a bomb set by the departing Germans did not detonate. Lviv citizens claim that it is the third most beautiful opera house in the world, after St. Petersburg and Odessa.
On p. 995, column 2, near top, where "a small café serving coffee and tea is in one corner" is mentioned, you might add that it is a favorite hangout for local artists and actors, who have no compunctions about striking up conversations with Westerners. The Arabian coffee (with cardamom) and tea are favorite specialties available only there.
On p. 997, col. 2, end of paragraph at top about the Museum of Old Arms, you might add mention of the nearby ruins of a synagogue (described at the end of my "tour of Jewish Lviv").
On p. 1000, col. 1 near top, you might add the sentence at the end of the paragraph on Pototsky Palace that a visit on a Saturday morning, the traditional wedding day, is a mind-boggling experience. Camera-wielding strangers are welcome to enter the fray of wedding parties lining up in the courtyard and various anterooms waiting for nuptials to be performed in the rooms on the far right. The bridesmaids sport dresses that make Hollywood parties look tame.
For the sweet tooth's in Lviv there are two places worth visiting, both on or near Prospekt Shevchenka. Right behind the Zhorzh is the main retail outlet of Svitoosh, Lviv's major candy factory and one of the few industries to weather the economic reforms relatively unscathed. (Another, smaller store is opposite the Rynok on the south side.) You can pick up boxes of chocolates and all kinds of loose goodies at bargain prices. We theorized that the popular "bird's milk" filling (you can spot the picture of a canary on the yellow box) might be popular for the docility of the small children and men.
For the second stop on the sweet-lovers tour, take the third street off of the middle of Prospekt Shevchenka behind the Zhorzh Hotel, one block before the Hrushevsky monument, namely the recently renamed vul. Dudayeva (after the Tchechen rebel leader, hated by the Soviets but glorified by Ukrainian nationalists). On the right hand side about midway down the short street is the retail outlet of Lviv's only but very large cake bakery. It is very unpretentious, but you can buy slices of the delicious cakes in the display which are weighed and sold by the gram. Enjoy them with a clientele of local teens in the smoke- and alcohol-free booths. If you happen to be invited somewhere, bringing a whole cake or a bag of candies would be an appreciated gesture and wouldn't break your pocketbook.
If you're wondering where the Ukrainian women get those dynamite dresses they wear around town, you won't want to miss a trip to the new South Market. Take private bus #70 from the square at Knyazya Romana just around the corner eastwards from the Zhorzh past the south end of Svobody, to its terminal stop, which is the market. You'll find rows and rows of boutique-like booths with all kinds of clothing, leather goods, toys, hardware and just about anything a body could want. The dress shops have all kinds of ingenious fold-out or walk-behind improvised dressing rooms. The skimpy party and evening dresses worn by the Ukrainian women for everyday occasions started at 45H (about $10) in 1999.
A couple of recommendations for eating: on p. 1001, col. 1, delete the second floor Restoran Lyux on Kopernika around the corner from the Zhorzh-it's really not a restaurant catering to individuals. Instead, the Stefanya on the east side of Svobody, just south of Katedralna, has a nice selection of local dishes, with translations on the menu, even if the waiters and waitresses don't speak English.
