Details: Lviv is located in western Ukraine near the Polish border. The town had a checkered history given the often-shifting borders in Europe. In 1772, after the First Partition of Poland, the city became the capital of the Habsburg Kingdom of Galicia and Lodomeria, and was known as Lemberg. In 1918, for a short time, it was the capital of the West Ukrainian People's Republic. Between the wars, the city was the center of the Lwów Voivodeship in the Second Polish Republic and had the country's third largest Jewish population. It became part of Soviet Ukraine in 1939 as part of the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact of non-aggression (between Germany and the Soviet Union), and bore the name that it does now. There were about 150,000 to 160,000 Jews in the town when the Germans invaded in 1941 (after the pact was terminated in June 1941, when Germany launched Operation Barbarossa). After the Russians liberated Lviv in 1944, about 2,500 Jews remained, many of whom chose Polish citizenship, leaving the city almost entirely emptied of its Jewish inhabitants. All these transitions are chronicled in this book. In the years before these changes took place, Jews who lived there, endured struggles both economic and violent. In the 16th and 17th centuries, their relations with Christians were marked by great tension over economic affairs as Jews attempted to break the Christian monopoly on local markets. But more ominous was the uprising of Ukrainian Cossacks led in 1648 by Bohdan Khmelnytsky whose goal was to drive out the country's Polish magnates and establish a Ukrainian state. His army attacked Jews in the villages, towns and small towns, mercilessly destroying, robbing and killing everywhere -- massacres that have been mourned by Jews as unprecedented outbursts of anti-Jewish violence and a precursor of the pogroms in the Russian empire, if not the Holocaust. The book ends with a long, detailed section on the “Annihilation of the Jews of Lwow” detailing the events of the Holocaust. Those who survived the German occupation fell into three categories: those who disguised themselves and had false documents; the “forest people” who had roamed the land with the partisans and were left destitute; and the “mice” who had hidden in caves, ducts, ditches and bunkers, and emerged weak and exhausted from lack of movement and lack of fresh air in their hiding places.   Alternate names for the town: L'viv [Ukr], Lwów [Pol], Lemberg [Ger], Lemberik [Yid], L'vov [Rus], Leopol [Lat] Lviv, Ukraine is located at 49°50' N 24°00' E 292 miles W of Kyyiv.   Nearby Jewish Communities: Znesinnya 3 miles ENE   Kukeziv 14 miles ENE Vynnyky 5 miles ESE   Velikiy Lyuben 14 miles WSW Navariya 6 miles SSW   Artasiv 14 miles NNE Pidbirtsi 7 miles E   Shchyrets 14 miles SSW Kamianopil 8 miles ENE   Novyy Yarychiv 15 miles ENE Podliski Malyye 9 miles NE   Zhovtantsi 15 miles NE Pykulovychi 10 miles ENE   Horodok 16 miles WSW Kulykiv 11 miles NNE   Zhovkva 16 miles N Borshchovychi 12 miles E   Mykolayiv 16 miles ESE Zvenyhorod 13 miles ESE   Hlynsk 17 miles NNW Ivano-Frankove 13 miles WNW   Didyliv 18 miles ENE

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