perfectly serene. No food coupons were introduced. The next day at night, when news about the hopelessness of the situation began to arrive from the front line, the authorities left Lvov, but they returned as soon as on the next day and began to prepare for defending the city. The Ukrainians thwarted those beautiful plans by starting a literal revolution the next day. Armed with weapons delivered by the Germans, they were shooting at the Bolsheviks from all directions: [11] rooftops, windows, churches. That state of affairs lasted three days. Finally, the situation was brought under control and even the theatres were opened.
Two days later, the first German detachments arrived in Lvov. That was on 30 June. The next day, on 1 July, with the Germans’ silent approval, the Ukrainians organised a pogrom on a scale unprecedented since Petlura’s times.
The pogromists walked from flat to flat in the Jewish district (Słowackiego, Sykstuska, Kopernika, and other streets), driving out all Jews found regardless of sex or age onto the street, where they arranged them into a four-sided mass and then squeezed them tighter and tighter, murdering them by stabbing them with knives or by hitting them with rifle butts, clubs, and even with their fists.
During the next couple of days new occasions for murdering the Jews were found. A number of corpses – a product of the NKVD’s activity – were found in all the Soviet prisons. Of course, the Germans and Bolshevik Ukrainian press put the blame on the Jews. As a result of that campaign many Jews captured on the street to bury those corpses were killed.
After those excesses came a period of relative peace, during which Jews were even hired to work in clerical positions, but less than two weeks later came the second wave of persecutions, that time not only inspired by, but also conducted by the Germans.
It began with an introduction of armbands with the Star of Zion and the imposition of a contribution in the amount of 20 million roubles on the Jewish Community. The situation was all the worse [12] as the Community had not existed during the Bolshevik times and had to be frantically organised simultaneously with the collection of money, as of course there were no funds available whatsoever. Moreover, there was a large-scale campaign to capture men, who were then decorated with yellow patches and deported to labour camps. The elderly, children, and disabled were also captured but met a relatively worse fate – they were killed. “Actually we should execute all
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