Something about Lviv.
A stroll through Lviv
Lviv is the country's undisputed architectural pearl, a maze of narrow cobbled alleys spilling into squares lined by 17th-century town houses and towering Baroque, Gothic and Renaissance churches. Formerly part of Poland, Austria and then Poland again, Lviv did not fall under Soviet rule until after WWII, so unlike most Ukrainian cities it still feels like the true Central European city that it once was – and that it's striving to be again. Its European character is especially noticeable if you are entering the city after several weeks in the Soviet east. Of course almost no tourists ever do this because no tourists visit Eastern Ukraine. So I was breaking new ground with my abrupt East-to-West transition. The hope was that I didn't go into shock.
I arrived in the city at 5.30 a.m., having slept roughly one hour on a train that I boarded in Khmelnytsky. I'm apparently in the minority among foreign tourists in that I loathe Soviet trains. Yes, I understand their quaint Ukrainian-village-on-wheels appeal. But for me that appeal fails to make up for the discomfort of sharing a furnace-hot kupe car with three strangers who may or may not snore, and/or have stinky feet and/or loudly swill vodka until the wee hours of the morning. When I arrive at my destination in the morning, almost always at some ungodly early hour (another drawback of Soviet trains), I'm usually not in the greatest of spirits.
A groggy early-morning stroll through the streets of Lviv hardly appealed, but as I had nothing else to do, I checked my bag at the train station, grabbed a Nescafe and set out. Arriving in the centre I immediately realized I was in for a treat. The streets and squares were deserted save for the odd early-rising churchgoer or bleary-eyed reveller escaping the disco. The sun was just rising above the 16th- and 17th-century facades of the townhouses on central ploshcha Rynok, illuminating the church spires in fiery shades of green, silver and bronze. Church music wafted through the otherwise silent squares, which normally brim with tourists in midsummer. I felt like I was walking around an abandoned movie set of a perfect Central European city.
Unfortunately reality's intrusion was inevitable. Within two hours, the march of tourists into Ploscha Rynok had begun. Before long the museums and restaurants were open too, a reminder that I had work to do. The mood's destruction was complete when a set of thunderheads rolled in, blotting out the sun and dispossessing the church spires of their giddy morning sheen.
In addition to plenty of old-world panache, Lviv shares something else in common with much of its eastern European brethren – a nasty streak of Xenophobia that goes back centuries. I was aware of Lviv’s reputation as a hotbed for nationalists and skinhead types, but it's really not something that I had noticed on previous visits to the city.
This time was different. In a foreboding sign, when I arrived in town a pair of two-story Nazi banners were hanging from the facade of Lviv's gorgeous Hapsburg-era opera house. It turned out the banners were just props for a movie, but seeing these banners was a chilling experience. Lviv was a major Jewish center before the war, with Jews making up about one-third of the city's population. The Nazis killed virtually every one of them at two notorious camps – Janowska, now a prison northwest of the city centre, and Belzec, an unspeakably hideous and largely forgotten extermination camp located north of Lviv in present-day Poland.
Throughout Eastern Europe, the Nazis were adept at recruiting local collaborators to assist in the slaughter of other human beings, and Ukraine was no different. For obvious reasons this controversial subject is taboo in Ukraine. Is it not just a mite strange, then, that city officials allowed these banners to be hung so nonchalantly from Lviv's most venerated edifice? Had I not spotted the video cameras, I might have actually been alarmed. Surely the banners could not help but open up old wounds from an era when genuine Nazi banners hung from the Opera House.
Perhaps they could have chosen a lower-profile venue, or at the very least made it clearer to passers-by that this was a movie set and not an actual neo-Nazi political rally.
Rather than draw conclusions about the city’s alleged xenophobic streak, I chalked the incident up to clumsiness. But the banners put me on my guard. And sure enough, that same evening I would come face to face with an ugly side of present-day Lviv’s personality. But that we’ll save for the next column.
One more note about Belzec. Nary a trace of Belzec remains today, and the camp receives little attention next to more famous camps like Dachau and Auschwitz. But in many ways Belzec was more awful. Victims sent to Belzec were killed immediately, often by hideous, experimental methods. That only one person survived Belzec is one reason why so little is known about it today. But it’s not the only reason. Wandering around Lviv for three days, I searched largely in vain for vestiges of the city’s Jewish past. There are a few scattered testaments lying around – mostly small plaques marking the sites of synagogues blown up by the Nazis. There’s a plaque at Janowska prison, and a poignant Holocaust monument in the old Jewish ghetto. But by and large the city’s Jewish past has, like Belzec, been burned and buried.
The small but resilient local Jewish community is planning to rebuild the Golden Rose Synagogue in the Old Town, blown up by the Nazis in 1941. Hopefully this will be an important step for the city in reconciling with its Jewish past.
Read more articles about Bloom's travels in Ukraine at http://mytripjournal.com/blukeblog
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