(НЕ)ПАМ’ЯТЬ ПРО ІНШИХ: ОБРАЗИ ПОЛЯКА ТА ЄВРЕЯ ЯК СУСІДІВ В УСНИХ МІРКУВАННЯХ СУЧАСНИХ ЛЬВІВ’ЯН

This article aims to examine the memory of Lviv’s contemporary inhabitants about the city’s former Polish and Jewish populations, which were the dominant ones until the middle of the 20th century. It looks at the images of the Pole and the Jew in their stories; what the sources of these are; which recollections do, or do not, operate in family memory, and are, or are not, passed on to future generations. The sources are biographical interviews recorded with inhabitants of O. Bohomoltsia Street in 2008‒2009 as part of the project «Lviv in the 20th Century: the History of One Street». The interviews are divided into three groups, based on the generations of the speaker. The interviews were conducted with local Ukrainians (including those originally from Lviv, ones displaced from Poland and others who moved from villages and towns in western Ukraine), as well as Ukrainians and Russians from eastern Ukraine who arrived in the city during the postwar years. Using oral history to study the memory of Lviv’s prewar Jewish populations shows silence about the Holocaust among witnesses of it, namely the oldest generation of respondents. With three exceptions, it did not become part of their biographical account. The theme of the Holocaust does not feature in family memory, just like the memory of the prewar Jews is not passed on. The postwar generation does not know about the prewar Jews of Lviv. They only associate the city’s prewar population with Poles. In the memory of Lviv’s contemporary inhabitants, Jews who arrived during the postwar years stand out sharply against the backdrop of the others who moved to the city at that time. They were not linked to the prewar Jews. Instead, they were treated as different, as «not genuine». As far as the memory of Poles is concerned, there is a clear generational divide: older respondents were reserved and less inclined to use national characteristics. Their descendants felt freer, as they lacked memory of living within the past Polish-Jewish majority. The same applies to the people who arrived from Eastern Ukraine and Russia. While long-term residents of Lviv mentioned the Poles in a piecemeal and unemotional way, Ukrainians resettled from Poland and villagers spoke of them in a neutral and negative tone. They compared Polish and Soviet daily life but kept silent about the conflict between nationalities. Meanwhile, settlers from the East considered themselves full heirs to the property of their prewar «ancestors». The collective memory in contemporary Lviv society, and Ukrainian society in general, as outlined in this article, stems from various sources, and is subject to how recollections were passed on to younger generations. These sources and avenues of their transmission range from private family memory to forms of official memorialization of the past.

 Jews, Poles, neighbors, Lviv in the middle ‒ second half of the 20th century, oral history, memory.