Suchergebnisse

The Polish-Ukrainian war 1918/19 is the key to understanding the conflicts in Lviv and eastern Galicia in the inter-war period. The war brought developments to a temporary halt, and created new conditions which particularly affected the way conflicts were waged. Certain historical options, such as those aimed at an equitable settlement, were rendered improbable while others (such as a violent solution to the conflict) became more likely.For the Jewish population, November 1918 was inextricably linked to the memory of the pogrom. It was therefore difficult for East Galician Jews to participate in Polish celebrations.The Ukrainians consciously formed their own community of memory. The experiences of November 1918 were handed down to subsequent Polish and Ukrainian generations through the practice of remembrance and commemoration in Polishand Ukrainian society. The younger generation of Ukrainian nationalists rejected the democratic concepts of the older generation of politicians and drew their own lessons from the experiences of the Polish-Ukrainian war. The mutual experiences of violence were an integral part of the mental baggage of the Lviv Poles, Ukrainians and Jews when World War II erupted.

Jewish, Polish and Ukrainian memories of the war contradict each other. In Polish and Ukrainian collective memory the glorification of the heroic struggle of national resistance fighters against the oppressors makes it difficult to engage with the question of Polish and Ukrainian collaboration and participation in Nazi crimes. The essay traces these conflicting memories back to contradicting experiences. This is done using the example of the multiethnic Eastern Polish, now Western Ukrainian city of Lviv. Polish and Ukrainian eyewitnesses refer again and again to the collaboration of Jews with the Soviet occupiers, while Jewish accounts accuse Poles and Ukrainians of antisemitism, of having profited from Jewish suffering and of active participation in the murder of the Jewish population. Poles and Ukrainians accuse each other of having started the ethnic cleansing of the Ukrainian-Polish borderlands. This article uses wartime documents by eyewitnesses and focuses on key events which have a firm place in Jewish, Polish and Ukrainian collective memory: the reciprocal perceptions during the Soviet occupation, the pogroms which occurred during the transition from Soviet to German occupation, and the violent resolution of the Polish-Ukrainian conflict in the second half of the war.