The notion of what is static, immovable, and what is dynamic, changing, drinks from personal and collective memory. A citizen of the Iberian Peninsula must surely consider that borders are something stony and eternal. One from Central Europe, less. And someone who was born in the main city of today’s western Ukraine, known as Lviv (on Spanish), Lvov (Russian), Lwów (Polish), lemberg (German), Lemberik (Yiddish), less.
Lviv (ukrainian) is now a city in Ukraine that has become a rallying point for those fleeing to Poland. The turbulent history of what was once a multicultural metropolis would delight Heraclitus, the philosopher of Ephesus who said that “everything flows, everything changes, nothing remains & rdquor ;.
Not to go too far back, the mobility of borders near Lviv can be circumscribed to the time of three generations. A Austro-Hungarian grandfathera father in Polish and ones soviet sons could be the x-ray of a current type family from Lviv that I would never have changed residence.
As long as they weren’t Jewish, of course. Because in 1910 they were the 30% of the population and, in 1944, when the Soviet troops conquered the city from the Nazis, the survivors were barely 800. Along the way, and in nearby concentration and extermination camps (Janowska and Belzec), up to 200,000 people were killed. Former Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal resided in the city’s ghetto where the Germans imprisoned the 100,000 native Jews plus another 100,000 refugees.
As Philippe Sands tells in his book ‘East-West’, it is in this city of a thousand names that, not by chance, the two jurists were born who created two concepts that today seem like those that have always existed, eternal, and that, in true, they are new mint. those of ‘genocide’ and ‘crimes against humanity’. The contributions of Raphael Lemkin and Hersch Lauterpacht, each one separately, were premiered at the Nuremberg trial. Until then, any state could treat any group as it pleased.
The historical border sequence of the city is one of those that does not allow blinking, at the risk of missing a passport change. With the end of the first World War domain is over Austro-Hungarian over Lemberg started in the eighteenth century. And a literal battle broke out between Ukrainians and Poles for control of the city. First, Lviv became the capital of the Republic of Western Ukraine. Then, Lwów became part of Poland.
In the Nazi-Soviet pact of 1939, and the division of Poland between both powers, Lvov fell to the communist side. Until Operation Barbarossa, in 1941, the Nazi offensive that bypassed the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact put Lemberg under the Reich.
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For a short time, though too long for the Jewish community of Lemberik. In 1944, the Soviets retook Lvov and the city became part of the Ukrainian Soviet Republic. It was a time of border stability that lasted until the decomposition of the communist regime in 1991. In the mid-1990s, Lviv became part of Ukraine.