Mick Hartley

More forgotten history – this time from The Guardian's Tom Gross in Ukraine:

It seems parts of Europe are less tolerant now than they were in the 16th century. Last week I watched as bulldozers began to demolish the adjacent remnants of what was once one of Europe's most beautiful synagogue complexes, the 16th-century Golden Rose in Lviv. Most of the rest of the synagogue was burned down, with Jews inside, by the Nazis in 1941.

During the war, 42 other synagogues were destroyed in Lviv, which from the middle ages to the 20th century was known by its Austrian (and Yiddish) name, Lemberg, and then called Lvov after the Soviets annexed it in 1945. The remnants of the Golden Rose are one of the few remaining vestiges of Jewish existence in Lviv, the majority of whose residents, in 1940, were Jewish.

It is not only morally wrong for bulldozers to drill through the last traces of this vibrant past without first giving the handful of remaining Jews here a chance to restore this site, or turn it into a place of memorial. It is legally wrong, too. Ukraine's own laws are designed to preserve such historic sites.

The Ukrainian authorities are not the only ones at fault. Where is the UN cultural organisation, Unesco? The synagogue ruins were designated part of a Unesco world heritage site in 1998.

And where is the European football body, Uefa? The Ukrainians are planning to build a hotel on the site to host next year's European football championships, the world's third most-watched sporting event, which they are co-hosting with Poland. So much for Uefa's much-hyped campaign to "kick racism out of football". (In addition to there being residual antisemitism in Ukraine, the authorities seem to be motivated by cultural and historical crassness and illiteracy and denial of the past, as well as real-estate greed.)

During the Holocaust, 420,000 Jews, including more than 100,000 children, were murdered in Lviv and its environs, more than in almost any other city in Europe. The killing was so efficient that the Nazis organised transports of Romanian and Hungarian Jews to be brought here to be killed once they were done killing the Polish and Ukrainian Jews. There were almost no survivors.

Yet you will hardly find any reference to this in the official guide books or in the museums of Lviv. There is no monument to the murdered Jews in Lviv's old town….

Two years ago, another site of mass murder in Lviv, the Citadel – where tens of thousands of Jews and others were tortured to death – was converted into a five-star hotel. Amazingly, the hotel is owned by Volodymyr Gubitsky, the deputy regional governor responsible for the preservation of culture and heritage.

The piece attracts the usual level of comment from CiF regulars.