elements”: party members, NKVD functionaries, higher-ranking civil servants, professors, and those locals (of course, except for Ukrainians because they had a right to be Piłsudski supporters in free Poland, communists in the Red republic, and now nationalists …) who held any higher positions, but predominantly the people indicated by the denunciators. Those who did not flee with the Bolsheviks or hide are doomed. These Ukrainian dignitaries also docilely let the Germans seal and empty all storehouses, storerooms, and shops without exception, thus letting them loot the city. So far the Germans have introduced military administration and courts-martial, imposed a curfew, confiscated weapons and radios, demanded release of POWs and exposure of Bolsheviks, ordered everybody to return to work, and manned all major strategic spots, the power station, waterworks, gasworks, bakeries, slaughterhouses, etc. The rest, at least for now, was handed over to those former [24] communist managers. Let them delude themselves that it has any significance. And so the Ukrainians were given their own militia, municipal board (led by a Polish inspector and a former Soviet deputy superintendant, professor and chairman of the university trade union),631 hospitals (ten per cent, the rest for the army), schools, trade (without products or shops), social welfare, etc. What kind of freedom is it without power, executive organs, money, and merchandise? The Ukrainians are already beginning to bark and this is only the second day. We have already had a foretaste of another paradise!
4 July. “Ukrainian hecatombs” – during the first days this topical issue does not leave the people’s lips and it fills all columns of the newly established Ukrainian scrap newspaper. This term refers to the victims of the Bolsheviks murdered before the Germans’ arrival. Over the last couple of weeks and during the first days of the war the NKVD conducted mass arrests. The prisoners whom the Bolsheviks did not manage to deport before leaving Lvov were slaughtered on the spot. Indeed, the prisons were an incredible sight, as the mass executions were conducted at the last moment and under horrible conditions: the prisoners were finished off with rifle butts, the wounded were left lying under heaps of corpses, the victims were not buried, etc. One thing needs to be clarified: the murdered were Jews, Poles, Ukrainians, and Soviets. Many had been awaiting sentence in prison for several months. They had not
