‘In the Presence of People No Longer Here’

The city is an architectural gem, almost a stage set. Unlike much of Europe, it suffered no major damage during either world war. Proud rows of 19th-century buildings line cobblestone streets that wind through low hills, past leafy parks and dozens of sidewalk cafés. Modern apartment blocks ring its outskirts, but most of the city looks much as it did when it was part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

The walls of a restaurant near City Hall are hung with dozens of brilliant caricatures—profiles captured in a few skillful strokes: a pot belly, an oversize cigar, a long beard, a fastidious hand poised on a tabletop, a preposterously upturned mustache. The subjects were all members of the provincial legislature, which in the last decades of Habsburg rule met here in an august chamber that is now a university auditorium. On the dial of a tall iron radiator in a downtown office building, the writing is in German. A grand opera house is topped with winged statues, and an array of churches and cathedrals—Roman Catholic, Greek Catholic, Armenian, and Orthodox—still look much as they did when listed in an 1887 Baedeker guidebook. So does the palatial railway station that, for many travelers , was once a departure point for the long journey to Ellis Island. On the heights of these buildings is a wondrous galaxy of turrets, spires, gargoyles, and finials. Below them are wrought-iron balconies, from which one imagines men in top hats and women with parasols looking down through pince-nez or lorgnette at plumed lancers on parade. At the four corners of City Hall (1835) are fountains (1793) with statues of mythological figures like Adonis and Neptune. They serve as rendezvous points: “I’ll meet you at Neptune at five o’clock.” But today Neptune and his companions are boarded up, the cathedrals have sheet metal over their stained glass, and the ground-floor windows of City Hall are sandbagged. For this is Lviv, in western Ukraine. Although an occasional building is scarred by a drone strike, Lviv has so far been largely spared the nightly attacks raining destruction on other parts of this beleaguered country.

There is one somber difference, however, between Lviv and similarly well-preserved cities in Western Europe. When you see such splendid older buildings, you assume that many of the people living in them are descendants of those who lived there a century or two ago. But not in Lviv. During and just after the Second World War, almost the entire population was slaughtered, was deported, or fled the advancing army of one side or the other.

Over the course of the 20th century, Lviv found itself in four different countries. As part of Austria-Hungary, it was known as Lemberg. Between the wars, it was Lwów in newly formed Poland. In 1945, the Yalta and Potsdam agreements moved Poland (“a country on wheels,” the Poles say) several hundred miles west, and the city was absorbed by the Soviet Union. Since 1991, it has appeared on maps as Lviv, in independent Ukraine. And that’s not even counting its seizure by Stalin’s Red Army from 1939 to 1941, followed by three years of Nazi occupation. Conquerors imposed their own place names (Adolf Hitler Square, Gorky Street) and time zones: The city ran on Berlin time under the Nazis and Moscow time under the Soviets.

Some who once lived here had a foreboding. “We were like ants bustling in an anthill over which the heel of a boot is raised,” wrote the Polish science-fiction novelist Stanisław Lem, who grew up here in the 1920s and ’30s. “Some saw its shadow … but everyone, the uneasy included, ran about their usual business until the very last minute.”

When that boot heel came down, the city’s buildings remained, but its people did not. Until Hitler invaded, just over half of its inhabitants were Polish, roughly a third Jewish, and some 15 percent Ukrainian. But after the Nazis arrived in 1941, they killed almost all of the Jews. Lem—himself Jewish but carrying forged “Aryan papers”—later described the streets of a Jewish neighborhood that “one day were empty, silent, their windows open and curtains moving in the wind.” On one street, Jewish bodies hung from those wrought-iron balconies.

Once the war ended, millions of people in Central and Eastern Europe were forcibly moved. Stalin expelled almost all Poles from his expanded Soviet Union, and newly Communist Poland did the same for almost all Ukrainians. The Poles who lived in Lviv were sent hundreds of miles away, to a swath of Germany given to Poland after the war, from which Germans were expelled. Meanwhile, Lviv and its surroundings were repopulated with hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians.

And yet, during the time Lviv was part of the Soviet Union—nearly half a century—there was almost no public discussion of all this. “I was born in 1979, so I remember those typical lectures about history in Soviet schools,” says Inna Zolotar, a public history educator in Lviv. “We were told about the great battles of the Red Army, nothing about local history. But between people, you know, very quietly, we understood that something happened that you are not allowed to talk about.”

Soviet schools ignored the Holocaust: The Nazis were mass murderers, teachers explained, but their victims were brave Soviet patriots of many ethnicities. And those massive postwar deportations were merely a matter of “repatriating” different peoples to their historical homelands. Much else went unmentioned as well—including, for instance, Lviv’s unusual place in legal history. In his intriguing East West Street, British author Philippe Sands tells how two of the greatest figures of human rights law—Raphael Lemkin, who developed the concept of genocide, and Hersch Lauterpacht, who did the same for crimes against humanity—both began their careers here.

“We are living,” says Sofia Dyak, a Lviv historian, “in the presence of people no longer here.”