Lwów / לעמבערג / Львів

In the early days of November 2017, a group of travellers yet unfamiliar with one another arrived in the western Ukrainian city of Lviv. Landing at Lviv International, their first impression of the city was a shining, modern airport building, recently constructed for the 2012 European Football Championship. But these new arrivals knew the city and brought with them countless impressions of an old city – under different names, and through memory. Their arrival, from places as far flung as Chicago, London, Washington, Geneva, and even Cape Town, was indeed: A return.

The return of this group of travellers was inspired by one person, who himself had visited the city for the first time in 2010, delivering a lecture on the origins of International Law. Barrister, professor, and author Philippe Sands could trace part of his family back to the city and its environs, and would be drawn back to it repeatedly. In the early winter days of 2017, his reconnection with Lviv would culminate in the unveiling of plaques, an international academic conference and an art performance at the cultural heart of the city. 

Each of the November arrivals at Lviv International had personal and powerful reasons to follow Philippe Sand’s invitation. Their return was a personal answer to a departure that had occurred in a distant past, when Lviv carried a different name: Lemberg, Lwów, לעמבערג‎‎, Львів, Львов. 

It is against this background of historic dispersion throughout the World that former inhabitants of the city and their relatives would reconnect in November 2017. Their winding paths back to Lviv would intersect at last with places of memory that had, somehow, outlasted history.

Largely undestroyed, Lviv’s old buildings retain a façade of the past, its streets invite to retrace unchanged steps of everyday errands, worn out thresholds entice to enter buildings and discover tenants of both past and present. The cityscape that endured through history, encapsulating not only architecture but also a mental image of the past, allows for personal pasts to be relocated and remapped: Where relatives lived, where they studied and worked, which places they left from or from which they were forced to leave, and where their paths within the city ended.

The 11th day of November carries special significance, as the date demarcating the end of the First World War in 1918. For Poland, this date coincides with the long-sought regaining of independence after having been erased from the maps of Europe for 123 years. For the city of Lviv, historically one of the centres of Polish culture, learning and politics, this was the beginning of a new era, one in which the city’s inhabitants would be freed of external rule, but compelled to resolve the apparent differences between its diverse population. This would prove all the more pressing under the weight of national sovereignty and self-determination issues that influenced interwar politics, and especially so in a city that was also a center of Jewish and Ukrainian culture and society.

99 years later, the Philharmonic of Lviv would stage a piece that retraces how the promise of 1918 would ultimately fail in the violent changes of the Second World War, a mere two decades later. 

In the audience, Gabriele Cox and her daughters, Alix Lemkin and Peter Trooboff as well as several hundred citizens of Lviv would follow Philippe Sands and Emanuel Ax as they took the stage to deliver “East West Street. A Song of Good and Evil”, a performance piece featuring spoken word and music from Bach to Beethoven, exploring themes of morality, culture and humanity against the historical backdrop of the origins of humanitarian law.

The piece centres on the three men Hersch Lauterpacht, Raphael Lemkin and Hitler’s personal lawyer and Governor-General of occupied Poland Hans Frank, whose life stories would intersect at the Nuremberg Trial after World War Two. All three shared a joint point of reference in their pasts – that shared past was the city of Lwów, Lemberg, Lviv.

Each return, be it in November or any other month, is always personal and profound. The Center for Urban History in Lviv has had the privilege to accompany many who have sought to reconnect with their personal or family history and to rekindle a special bond between the inhabitants of the city of Lviv, past and present.

Every one person who has left this city or who returns to it, personally or through extension of family memory, awards the “City of Lions” a special place on his or her personal mental map.