Incompatible Experiences: Poles, Ukrainians and Jews in Lviv under Soviet and German Occupation, 1939-44

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.