June 21: The Lvov Ghetto

The ghetto of Lvov (L’viv) in southeastern Poland was liquidated by the Nazis on this date in 1943. Lvov had been occupied by the USSR following the Hitler-Stalin Pact of 1939, and the Jewish population of 100,000 had rapidly swelled to 200,000 as Jews fled Nazi-occupied Poland. (Many were sent to remote areas within the USSR in the summer of 1940.) As soon as the Nazis occupied the city on June 30, 1941 — eight days after their invasion of the USSR began — Ukrainian nationalists and members of the Einsatzgruppe C massacred about 6,000 Jews. The Nazis shot thousands more as they established the ghetto in November. By the following summer, 65,000 Jews had been deported to the Belzec extermination camp, thousands more to the Janowska slave labor camp, and casual killing within the ghetto was relentless. During the final liquidation, a small number of Jews managed to launch hand grenades and Molotov cocktails at the German and Ukrainian police, killing nine and wounding twenty before the police began to set the buildings on fire. By the time the Red Army reentered the city in July, 1944, only a handful of Jewish survivors remained — some of whom had lived in the city’s sewers for more than a year. Jews had been present in Lvov (renamed Lemberg in 1772) since the 13th century. It was the center of Hasidic Judaism by the end of the 18th century, and home to the first Zionist organizations in the 1880s. For some difficult film footage of assaults within the Lvov ghetto, click here.

“Daddy found out that there would be a liquidation of the Ghetto . . . we headed for the sewer. . . . I lay on Mommy’s knees and Pawelek was on Daddy’s. This lasted for five weeks. We couldn’t move or get up. There were twenty other people with us. Every day, from the first day, the Polish sewer workers brought us food: black bread and margerine. They were very nice to us. Because they were afraid that someone might notice them, they always came into the sewers through different sewer covers. Daddy brought us water in a jug which he carried in his teeth because he had to walk very stooped. . . . After five weeks, other sewer workers found our hiding place. We had to run away. By then we were only eleven people. The others had died.” —Krystyna Chiger, who lived in the sewers for fourteen months