Pogrom in Lviv

On the day the Poles took Lviv a pogrom began in the city’s Jewish quarter. From 22 to 24 November 1918 Polish soldiers, including men from volunteer units and from the relief force, and civilians, among them criminals released earlier from prison, looted Jewish shops and flats, set houses on fire and killed residents. A synagogue burned down together with its Torah scrolls. The number of dead is disputed to this day. The findings of Polish, Jewish and American commissions of 1918–1919 range from about 50 to at least 150 Jews killed, and several hundred were wounded. The pogrom caused a wide stir in Europe and America and weighed on Polish-Jewish relations for years.

Neutrality and accusations

Before the war Lviv had more than 200,000 inhabitants, over a quarter of them Jews. When on the night of 31 October–1 November the Ukrainians seized the city and the Poles took up arms, Jewish leaders declared neutrality. On 1 November a Jewish militia was formed in the Jewish quarter, which found itself on the Ukrainian side. It numbered about 300 men, 200 of them armed, and was meant to protect the quarter from gangs of robbers. The Polish military press, above all “Pobudka”, nevertheless accused the Jews of helping the Ukrainians and the militia of shooting at Polish soldiers. The commandant of the city’s defence, Czesław Mączyński, later wrote that the militia had fought on the Ukrainian side under the pretence of neutrality. One of its leaders, Ozjasz Wasser, denied this, while a later report by delegates of the Polish Ministry of Foreign Affairs confirmed several breaches of neutrality. The historian Roman Wapiński concluded that most of the Jewish population had remained neutral. The accusations, repeated throughout three weeks of fighting, prepared the ground for revenge.

Three days

When Polish units entered the city centre on the morning of 22 November and the victory was being celebrated in the Market Square, attacks on Jewish shops began. According to some accounts, the spark was an attack by soldiers on a jeweller’s shop on the corner of the Market Square and Szewska Street. The looting spread to the Jewish quarter. According to accounts collected by Israel Cohen, an envoy of the British Zionist organisation, when a Jewish delegation asked the command to stop the violence, one of the staff officers, Antoni Jakubski, is said to have replied that a punitive expedition against the Jewish quarter was under way. The Foreign Ministry delegates found that although no order for a punitive expedition had been issued, the soldiers and officers taking part in the looting believed that the command approved of it.

General Bolesław Roja declared a state of emergency and summary courts as early as 22 November, but the order was announced and posted up only on 24 November. Mączyński blamed a delay at the printers. Military patrols restored order on the morning of 24 November. According to the Foreign Ministry delegates, more than 50 two- and three-storey houses burned down and more than 500 Jewish shops and warehouses were plundered. About 2,000 people were left homeless and 70 children lost both parents. At least a dozen or so rapes were recorded. The Morgenthau report speaks of 38 burned houses and a destroyed synagogue.

How many victims

The number of dead depends on who counted and how: whether only Jews or Christians too, and whether only 22–24 November or also those killed earlier, during the fighting. The Jewish Relief Committee counted 73 Jews killed and 437 wounded, and the figure most often repeated in the literature is 72. The Foreign Ministry envoys, Leon Chrzanowski and Józef Wasercug, wrote in their report of 17 December 1918 of at least 150 killed. The Extraordinary Government Commission of Inquiry chaired by Judge Zygmunt Rymowicz announced in February 1919 that about 50 Jews had died, some of them from stray bullets. The American mission of Henry Morgenthau counted 64 dead in 1919. A police list of February 1919, published by the historian Zbigniew Zaporowski, names 44 people killed or dead of wounds from those three days, 11 of them Christians. An unpublished study attributed to Mączyński spoke of 35 dead, and Mączyński himself claimed that many of the victims had been killed during the fighting.

Seventy-nine people were later charged with crimes committed in the Jewish quarter, among them 46 women and 8 soldiers. News of the pogrom went round the European and American press. It was not the only such outbreak of violence in the first weeks of independence, since on 11 and 12 November anti-Jewish violence had broken out in Kielce, but it was Lviv that became for the world the symbol of violence against Jews in the reborn Poland. The pogrom was one of the reasons why in 1919 the Great Powers demanded guarantees of minority rights from Poland.