Lemberg - Lwow - L'viv: Sites of persecution

The center of the city suffered little damage in July 1944 when Red Army forces invested, then occupied L'viv and captured what remained of its defenders. Today, most of the urban landscape that witnessed the ghettoization and eventual murder of at least 125,000 Jews between November 1941 and November 1943 is similar to its disposition sixty-five years ago. These images may be cross referenced to a contemporary German map of Lemberg (2.1944) that will appear in this blog in the near future.

The first photo, above, is the Sobieski School, located at 11 Zamarstynivka [Zamarstinowka] Street, just south of the railway embankment that separated the Jewish ghetto from the "Aryan" section of the city. Across from Sobieski is the Zamarstyniv underpass (from where I took this photo), which connected the northern and southern halves of the city. The underpass bisects the railway embankment about 250 meters east of the former main ghetto entrance, the underpass on Peltevna Street (second photo). Nazi authorities first used Sobieski as a transit site during the ghetto reduction action in March 1942. All seized Jews were destined for either the Janowska forced labor camp (Zwangsarbeitslager), or across Janowska Street [Weststrasse] from it, the Livandivka [Livandowka] embarkation platforms for trains to the killing centers in neighboring Lublin District. Those Jews were first deposited at the school where German authorities re-checked their identities and papers in its crowded class rooms. Ukrainian and German police then escorted the Jews to the city's northwest limit along Janowska Street.

The so-called bridge of death (as Jewish memoirists referred to it), in the second image, was where the German security and civil administrators established the only passageway into the Jewish residential district (later, ghetto, then Judenlager - Jewish camp). It is the underpass on Peltevna [Peltwena] Street. Today, it is the site of a memorial to the Jewish victims of the Nazi occupation; the memorials visible in the foreground are situated within the former ghetto area just north of the embankment. This perspective show clearly the railroad bridge and embankment that defined the southern edge of the Jewish quarter. When the German civil administrator (Stadthauptmann) ordered the residential district established in 15 November 1941, security personnel funneled all Jews passing into the area through this underpass. Elderly and ill Jews were separated from the rest and killed nearby; others were searched and their valuables seized if those were not sufficiently well concealed. When security authorities converted the Jewish quarter into a fenced ghetto after the murder of the Judenrat in early September 1943, a gate sealed off this official point of entry into the area.