a small percentage of a sum they needed to survive. The activity of all charitable institutions a)706 was suspended and they were closed.
The attitude of other ethnic groups towards the Jews had always been tense to some extent, which was caused exclusively by the Jews’ pushing their way up to managerial positions. The Poles, for instance, had never exhibited such tendencies. Most strike workers were Polish. In the official statements antisemitism was non-existent. The press was far from it too and it took absolutely no interest in that issue. However, it could be sensed during conversations with more prominent [33] and high-ranking members of the party. They claimed, for instance, and not without grounds, that all illegal trade was conducted by Jews, who took advantage of the Russians’ naiveté and gullibility.
We had been prepared for the possibility of a Soviet–German conflict for quite some time. Particularly the Ukrainians had been conducting anti-Bolshevik and pro-German activity for quite a while: distributing portraits of Hitler, putting up banners saying, “We will build a bridge for Hitler from Jewish heads”, etc. But the outbreak of the war surprised everybody. On the night of 22 June 1941 Lvov was bombed for the first time and from then on air raids occurred daily. (The Bolsheviks mobilised some of the men capable of carrying arms, including refugees, who had appeared before the commission in their time and had received mobilisation cards). After only three days of war the Soviet troops had to deal [34] with two enemies, as the Ukrainians commenced partisan combat on a large scale, both in the city and in villages, shooting and throwing grenades at the “Red” soldiers. The campaign continued non-stop and with invariable intensity until the retreat of the Bolshevik troops.
At midnight on 30 June the Red Army was leaving Lvov and six hours later the Germans marched into the city. In the first couple of days the Ukrainians already began to implement brutal persecutions against the Jews, taking advantage predominantly of the issue of prisons. The issue was that as the Bolsheviks left Lvov they had set all the prisons ablaze and murdered the detainees. Most of the victims had been Ukrainians arrested for participation in street combat, but there had been many Jews and Poles too. And now the Ukrainians exaggerated the issue out of proportion, claiming that the Ukrainians had been murdered by the Jewish NKVD. They even intentionally
