Contentious Historical Legacies of the Polish-Ukrainian Borderland in the Twentieth Century

Less than a hundred years ago, the ethnic landscape of the former Habsburg province of Galicia, whose territory is now divided between Poland and Ukraine, underwent sweeping changes. For almost six centuries before the outbreak of WWII, Poles and Jews used to dominate the demographics of many Galician urban settings. The city of Lemberg/Lwów/L΄viv, home to one of the oldest east-central European universities, was claimed by Poles, Jews, and Ruthenians/Ukrainians as their cultural metropole.Footnote ¹ Despite perpetual tensions among the three main population groups, the city and the region did not experience episodes of shocking violence with strong ethnic overtones until the twentieth century.Footnote ²

In the wake of the Soviet repressions in 1939–41, the exterminatory policies of the Nazis in 1941–44, and the postwar population exchanges, the demographic composition of the city changed drastically. Nevertheless, even being stripped of its pre-war Jewish and Polish populations, distinct local genealogies of the region were persevered in various postwar contexts due to the continuing, although restricted, cross-border circulation of ideas, people, and goods within eastern Europe and between east and west.Footnote ³ Gradually, fragmentary links with prewar cultural diversity could be retrieved behind the backdrop of Soviet or “real socialist” ideological conventions. With the end of the Soviet system, Poles and Ukrainians managed to quickly establish partner relationships on high political levels. In tandem with this, a dialogue was launched about the troubled history, which resulted in several important commemorative initiatives cutting across the confessional and political lines of division.Footnote ⁴ In the new millennium, however, Polish-Ukrainian relations have been affected by increasing confrontation in the domain of history politics.Footnote ⁵

As unresolved memory conflicts affect both societies, public efforts to come to grips with contentious historical legacies continue. They have been well in line with the idea that “memory must become an object of public policy after communal violence.”Footnote ⁶ To scrutinize how this dictum is achieved in practice, this study zooms into multiple contexts of remembrance of one resonant wartime crime that eventually became publicly-commemorated due to contacts and exchanges between various memory actors. We also highlight a transformed quality of commemoration that morphed from local to translocal. Although it was tempting to use the more conventional term “transnational,” we presume that “translocal” is more accurate in this context, as it does not only refer to processes and phenomena transcending the boundaries of national states, but also lays a particular emphasis on networks and interactions that bypass state institutions.Footnote ⁷ It also makes sense to distinguish between translocal and “transcultural.” Translocal better conveys the idea of entanglements between localities whose populations, even separated by significant distances and state borders, tend to maintain dense contacts underpinned not so much by common cultural affinities as by ideas about shared personal genealogies and similar historical destiny.

This study thus explores how one local historical occurrence, namely the murder of a group of renowned Polish academics under the Nazi occupation of Lwów/L΄viv, evolved into a translocal commemorative project underpinned by heterogeneous claims on truth, originality, and identity.Footnote ⁸ This case may also serve as an apt illustration of the difficulty of figuring out consensual grammars of commemoration in the east European borderlands, permeated by not always easily-detectable capillary links of historical affinity and conflict. Surprising twists of memory about the murdered academics indicate the existence of a negotiated and highly-contested terrain of meaning within which a range of options is possible, depending not only on ideological dictates and state symbolic politics, but also—and sometimes primarily—on the inclinations and priorities of smaller actors. In what follows, we focus on agency and rhetoric of those actors and milieus that have defined core messages of the memory event in question. In conclusion, we point out the principal lessons pertaining to the commemoration of perished populations of the Polish-Ukrainian borderland that can be drawn from the discussed case.

Execution on the Wulecki Hills as a Historical Event: Riddles and Ambivalence

The morphing of historic occurrences into historical events and commemorative projects is seldom a linear and predictable process.Footnote ⁹ Cases of politically- and ideologically-motivated assassination are especially instructive in this respect. That the murder of a specific group of the Polish intelligentsia in June 1941 turned into an event charged with potent symbolism is partly the effect of all the unanswered questions and contradictory pieces of evidence that create a perfect ground for rumors and speculations.Footnote ¹⁰ This particular crime has also been inscribed into fractured and contradictory commemorative contexts, which makes establishment of its consensual interpretation quite a problematic enterprise. The death of several dozen people may seem as a relatively insignificant loss against the background of fourteen million victims of the deliberate killing policies of the Nazis and Soviets in the “bloodlands.”Footnote ¹¹ However, as a memory event, the case of the Lwów professors, similarly to Sonderaktion Krakau, has been singled out from other operations targeting Polish elites.Footnote ¹² Representing the dynamics of multidirectional memory,Footnote ¹³ in various contexts it has been entangled with—and sometimes, in effect, also obscured—such topics as the Holocaust, wartime massacres in Volhynia and Galicia, Sovietization of the occupied eastern Polish lands, and Polonization of the Recovered Lands.

It has been established beyond any doubt that on the night of July 3–4, 1941, an Einsatzkommando led by SS-Brigadeführer Eberhard Schöngarth shot to death a group of prominent academics on the Wulecki Hills (in Polish, Wzgórza Wuleckie), close to the city center of L΄viv/Lwów. The massacre was observed by terrified dwellers of several houses in the vicinity. The oft-cited number of victims is forty-five.Footnote ¹⁴ Among the executed were five women. Among the males were twenty three professors, many of them figures of international renown affiliated with the L΄viv Medical Institute, the University, the Polytechnics, the Zoo-Veterinary Institute, and the city hospital. Professors of medicine and physicians were the largest group, followed by scientists from the Polytechnics. Among the victims was also one priest, a doctor of theology.

The execution was a continuation of the large-scale extermination campaign targeting the Polish intelligentsia. Two years earlier, in November 1939, 183 employees of the Jagiellonian University were arrested and transported to the Sachsenhausen concentration camp in the aftermath of Sonderaktion Krakau. Footnote ¹⁵ Compared to Kraków, however, a significantly smaller group of academics was singled out during the first days of the Nazi occupation of L΄viv. The question why exactly these individuals were selected for the massacre looms large both in the historical quest and in commemorative contexts. Historical studies suggest several possible explanations that add more details to the portrait of the perpetrators and draw attention to the victims.

A crucial reason for distinguishing this small group might be their alleged co-operation with the Soviet authorities.Footnote ¹⁶ The former prime minister of Poland, Prof. Kazimierz Bartel, as well as several other Polish academics who were called to Moscow shortly before the German occupation, could be a given target. Only eight of the eighteen delegation members, however, were arrested despite the fact that German authorities knew all their names.Footnote ¹⁷ This and many other contradictions provoke further questions about circumstances of the assault on the L΄viv academic elite as an episode in the chain of unprecedented brutalities accompanying the end of the Soviet and the beginning of the Nazi occupation in summer 1941.Footnote ¹⁸ These details may also provide a clue about the complexity of motives and interests behind the massacre. Selectivity of the executions can be reasonably explained both by the reliance of the Nazis on inaccurate lists, and by the tactic of random terror.Footnote ¹⁹ Purely mercantile motives could also have played a role in targeting at least several professors, as immediately after their deaths the Dutch art dealer and SS man Pieter Menten quickly appropriated their valuable possessions.Footnote ²⁰

Although this particular crime might have been triggered by an array of possible motives, for the Nazis the victims’ elite status and Polish nationality was a sufficient reason for their extermination.Footnote ²¹ That the majority of the executed on the Wulecki Hills were doctors and scientists—a well-connected, influential and especially respected stratum of Polish nationals—prompts this conclusion.Footnote ²² The group was quite homogenous in terms of ethnicity owing to the prevalence of ethnic Poles among the university professors before the German occupation of L΄viv.Footnote ²³ Nevertheless, the fact that the group included two Jews (Dr. Stanisław Ruff and his son), one part-Ukrainian (Prof. Adam Sołowij), and one person of Austrian origin (Prof. Franciszek Gröer, released but then captured anew in 1942) indicates that the “race” and ethnicity of the victims was less important in this context than their social status.

This is not to say that ethnicity was a factor of minor significance in Nazi-occupied L΄viv. On the contrary, it became a matter of life and death in a myriad of contexts. The brutality of the German regime reignited local ethnic conflicts, especially the older Ukrainian-Polish animosity that was further aggravated by the effects of the preceding Soviet occupation.Footnote ²⁴ On the ruins of the Polish state, Germans offered the opportunity for collaboration that was readily explored by Ukrainian nationalist forces. One of its most well-known episodes was the formation of the Nachtigall Batallion, stationed in L΄viv during the first days of July 1941, that consisted mostly of Galician Ukrainians and operated under orders of the faction of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists led by Stepan Bandera, the OUN(b).Footnote ²⁵ Polish-Ukrainian strife escalated in tandem with the implementation of the Final Solution in 1942–43 and culminated in large-scale interethnic violence in Volhynia and Galicia. Although cities were not affected by the massacres on the same scale as the countryside, in Nazi-occupied L΄viv ethnically motivated assaults became a part of daily reality. The Lwów academy had turned into an arena of bitter national and political-ideological contestation already before the war, but the German occupation brought unprecedented violence in its wake.Footnote ²⁶ In the opinion of contemporaries, the murder of the Polish professors could not have happened without denunciation by Ukrainians.Footnote ²⁷ Furthermore, rumors circulated that Ukrainians had taken part in the murder itself. Bearing in mind that the Nachtigall Batallion was in L΄viv in the first days of July and could be connected to the anti-Jewish violence, some historians have concluded that responsibility for the execution of the professors also belonged to this detachment.Footnote ²⁸ As the old animosity between Galician Poles and Ukrainians was a part of the daily context in Nazi-occupied L΄viv, it gradually became elevated as the genuine explanation for the murder on the Wulecki Hills by these protagonists. This interpretation was represented primarily by Polish expellee organizations, whose resettled inhabitants of the borderland territories, together with their relatives, were dissatisfied with the official story that pointed to German aggressors as the principal culprits.

Memory Event “Lwów Professors” Takes Shape: Unnamed Victims, Multiple Perpetrators, and Academic Legacies before 1991

Immediately after capture of L΄viv in July 1944, Soviet authorities confirmed the information about the professors’ deaths, which had previously been circulated by the Polish government in London.Footnote ²⁹ Since that time and until the early 1990s, their commemoration evolved autonomously in Poland and the USSR.Footnote ³⁰ This happened against the background of postwar (geo)political divisions and Soviet ideological dictates, but the situation was cemented by more subtle lines of conflict. With the reannexation of the eastern Polish territories (so-called kresy) by the USSR in 1944, Soviet and Polish authorities organized massive “repatriations” and population exchanges across the Polish-Soviet border that in effect erased the remaining Polish academic milieu from L΄viv. At the same time, survivors who continued the world-famous traditions of Lwów academia were welcome in Kraków, but most importantly a part of them were directed to build higher education and boost Polishness on the former German territories given to Poland in 1945, primarily in Breslau/Wrocław. The cultivation of a prewar identity among the resettled as well as their regular contacts with the kresy lost to the Soviets were not in interests of the communist authorities either in Poland or Soviet Ukraine. Meanwhile, Ukrainian-style Sovietization made topics relating to the historical presence and achievements of Poles increasingly sensitive in postwar L΄viv.

As a result, the commemorative topography of the mnemonic event “the murdered Lwów professors” became remarkably asymmetrical. The local memory, stressing the high achievements and martyrdom of the murdered academics, drifted westwards where it was cherished primarily by the university elite who gradually strengthened their positions against the authorities.Footnote ³¹ From the outset, Wrocław and Kraków positioned themselves as natural inheritors of Lwów academia's traditions, and as guardians of the legacy of the executed professors.Footnote ³² Especially in Wrocław, where, according to different estimates, between five to nine percent of the postwar population was comprised of expellees from Lwów, memory of the professors was nurtured not only in academic circles, but also in a broader cultural and educational context.Footnote ³³ On the other side of the redrawn eastern border of Poland, in Soviet L΄viv, the narrative about the professors became fractured, and its different parts were used for furnishing disparate historical plots. Achievements of the local predecessors were known in western Ukrainian academic circles, but continuation of the prewar academic traditions and the acknowledgement of their scholarly ancestry were not practiced. As for the story about the murder on the Wulecki Hills, it was subsumed in the broader narrative of the Great Patriotic War: the killed intelligentsia was presented as both Soviet victims of the Hitlerites and fighters against fascism.

A core question pertaining to commemorative topography is whether the discussed event was remembered in postwar Germany. The wartime extermination of the Polish elite did not become a part of the national memory culture in the same manner as the Holocaust. Nevertheless, in 1960 the German public was reminded about the murdered L΄viv professors in connection with the resonant Soviet-led campaign against Theodor Oberländer, the West German politician who used to serve as the advising officer of the Nachtigall Battalion.Footnote ³⁴ Several decades later, in the 2000s, the German historian Dieter Schenk assumed the role of a public memory actor actively promoting knowledge of this specific crime. Hence, the cross-border topography of the discussed memory event has nowadays a more complicated shape than the nexus between Poland and Ukraine or between L΄viv, Wrocław, and Kraków.

Aside from the topography, another crucial factor that shaped the discussed mnemonic event was the constellation of mnemonic actors. Over the span of half a century, the memory of the perished Lwów professors has been kept alive in the Polish People's Republic and to some extent in Soviet Ukraine primarily due to the efforts of academic elites. The achievements and martyrdom of the prominent representatives of the partly dispersed, partly displaced, and partly extinct academic community of the prewar Galician metropole became an important element of the institutional heritage of postwar Polish academia.Footnote ³⁵ In the 1990s, several educational institutions in L΄viv could also claim this as part of their heritage and reposition themselves as custodians of the professors’ memory. The important role of publicly commemorating the event was gradually assumed by the actors prominent for their strong moral and personal commitment. The Roman Catholic Church, whose influence on both sides of the Polish-Ukrainian border has grown exponentially since 1991, together with relatives of the murdered academics began to speak with their own distinct voices. From the first postwar years until the present day, however, various gatekeepers, ranging from Communist Party functionaries and high-level politicians to city administrations and public relations advisers have monitored the endeavors of the academic custodians, the relatives, and the church.

In postwar Poland, the story about the Lwów professors was firmly inscribed into the traditional framework of martyrdom and the revival of the Polish nation. It oscillated between two main lines of narration. On the one hand, the general condemnation of “Hitlerite fascism” and homage to all murdered Polish intellectuals was installed as a politically-acceptable commemorative formula. The academics and intelligentsia were thereby distinguished as a special kind of wartime victims and this, in projection, could give them leverage vis-à-vis the party-state. At the same time, this narrative conveniently avoided the controversy that mentioning of Lwów and the kresy would imply in the contemporary political situation. On the other hand, the competing story of martyrdom of specifically the Lwów professors, and the discrete but persistent reminders about their particular legacy in the Recovered Lands became more pronounced towards the end of the socialist period.

The vagaries of the Wrocław monument to the murdered Lwów professors aptly demonstrate this dynamic. As has been mentioned, the academic elite originating from Lwów played a crucial role in the development of Polish higher education in the former German territories.Footnote ³⁶ Universities in postwar Wrocław renounced any German academic legacy and proclaimed their institutional ancestry from the prewar Lwów academia. Accordingly, the emotional and symbolic charge of the Lwów heritage was strongest in Polish academic circles. Construction of a monument to the Lwów professors had been discussed in Wrocław since 1949, but the first real opportunity emerged only in 1956, on the fifteenth anniversary of the murder. A lack of both funding and enthusiasm from the Polish authorities blocked the initiative at that time, however. Despite the drawback, the academics remained committed to their cause and organized fund-raising.Footnote ³⁷ The memorial that was officially titled “the monument to Polish scientists, victims of Hitlerism” was finally unveiled on September 3, 1964, on the territory of the Wrocław Polytechnic campus.Footnote ³⁸ When announcing the planned inauguration, local newspapers followed the official prescription and wrote about “martyrdom of all [authors’ emphasis] Polish scientists murdered by barbaric fascism in WWII.”Footnote ³⁹ The stylistics of the commemoration emphasized secular heroism rather than mourning or religious values, as the public ceremony included military guards, military salutes, and a march of the Wrocław academics around the new monument.

The design of the memorial is quite abstract. Its central section features stylized human figures, one of them falling, the other being shot (Figure 1). In his official inaugural address, Prof. Stanisław Kulczyński, the former rector of Jan Kazimierz University of Lwów, turned to the habitual rhetoric of the martyrdom of all Polish scientists.Footnote ⁴⁰ In compliance with official imperatives, Kulczyński addressed the wartime losses of national science in a broad international context, and focused specifically on the mission of Wrocław academia as a cultural outpost of socialist Poland on the Recovered Lands. Nevertheless, he also mentioned a special “vision of a scene that took place on July 4, 1941, under the wall of death in the sand pit of Wólka in Lwów.”Footnote ⁴¹ His speech signaled that the Wrocław academics were determined to follow their own line of narration, notwithstanding political pressure.

Figure 1.

Monument to the Lwów (L΄viv) professors in Wrocław. Sculptor Borys Michałowski. Photo by Eleonora Narvselius.

In 1966, shortly after the inauguration of the monument in Wrocław, the professors were honored in Kraków. A plaque placed in the Franciscan church for the first time revealed their names in a public space.Footnote ⁴² In 1981, with the rise of Solidarity, the monument in Wrocław was also complemented with plaques containing the names of the Wulecki Hills victims.Footnote ⁴³ Instead of being dedicated to all the fallen Polish scientists of WWII, it became a site explicitly commemorating those who perished in Lwów.Footnote ⁴⁴ Notably, the plaques were unveiled not by politicians or academic functionaries, but by the widow of one of the victims, Dr. Maria Witkiewicz. From being an arena of confrontation between an academia keen on forging its institutional heritage and regional ancestry, on the one hand, and the authorities imposing an idea of an all-national heroic pantheon, on the other, the monument gradually became a site of grief, prayer, and mourning.

Memorialization of the professors took a different course in postwar Ukraine. Throughout the Soviet period, the event itself was regarded as a local episode without broader resonance or significance for (Soviet) Ukrainian history or identity. Nevertheless, in 1946, Abrachamowicz Street, adjacent to the Wulecki Hills was renamed after murdered Prof. Tadeusz Boy-Żeleński, who cooperated with the Soviet authorities and used to be a member of the Union of Soviet Writers. In 1956, on the fifteenth anniversary of the crime, there were plans to erect a monument on the Wulecki Hills, but eventually they were put on ice.Footnote ⁴⁵ Apparently, this happened due to the tense international situation in the wake of Iosif Stalin's death. In the atmosphere of increasing discontent against Soviet dictates in central Europe, the inauguration of a monument in the former Polish metropole annexed by the USSR might look provoking. Also, as has been mentioned, an endeavor of the Wrocław academics to mount a similar monument in their city around the same time failed. Although officially the initiative was postponed for lack of funding, orders from Moscow seems to be a more plausible explanation.Footnote ⁴⁶

While in Wrocław the plans to honor the professors with a monument were finally realized in the 1960s, in L΄viv this decade was empty of similar commemorative initiatives. Nevertheless, the memory event reemerged, but in a significantly modified frame. In the changed political climate of the 1960s, Soviet authorities launched a massive campaign against “Ukrainian bourgeois nationalism.” To discredit the postwar Ukrainian insurgence, the story of the wartime collaboration of Ukrainian nationalists with the Nazi was brought into the limelight. Although directly after the war Soviet propaganda never mentioned the Nazi-led Nachtigall Batallion as responsible for the extermination of the L΄viv intelligentsia, this version gained currency in the 1960s.Footnote ⁴⁷ Rumors circulated that the new Soviet monument to the executed academics had to contain an inscription reading “To the scientists shot by the Hitlerites and the Ukrainian bourgeois nationalists.”Footnote ⁴⁸ The vagaries of this phantom monument, which was repeatedly discussed by the local authorities, went to the stage of project documentation and was almost finished, but then hastily dismantled in 1980, is a remarkable story.Footnote ⁴⁹ Even such initiated persons as the mayor of Wrocław, Rafał Dutkiewicz, and the former rector of Wrocław Polytechnic University, Prof. Andrzej Wiszniewski, who propelled the eventual building of the L΄viv memorial in 2011, stated in their interviews that they did not know about its Soviet predecessor.Footnote ⁵⁰

Rare pictures of the unfinished monument provide a clue that the project, authored by L΄viv sculptor Emmanuil Mys΄ko, conceptually resonated with the one in Wrocław.Footnote ⁵¹ Both compositions were anthropomorphous and stylized, although Mys΄ko, who was famous for his sculptural portraits, laid an accent on the facial features of several figures emerging from a massive rock. This detail could have had fatal consequences; according to one rumor the composition was dismantled in 1980 (according to another one, in 1976) after a denunciation claiming that one of the figures resembled a local dissident.Footnote ⁵² Another account states that this happened because of the easily recognizable figure of the “unreliable” Kazimierz Bartel, who until the outbreak of WWII was the Prime Minister of “bourgeois” Poland.Footnote ⁵³

It seems, however, that the costly monument that could allegedly be so useful for discrediting the nationalist movement in western Ukraine was hastily dismantled not because of a banal denunciation, but rather due to a coincidence of political circumstances, much like in the 1950s. Soviet-Polish relations grew tense in the wake of the riots sparked in 1976 by food price increases in Poland and the subsequent advance of the Solidarity movement. Another contributing factor could have been internal struggles in the L΄viv branch of the Artists’ Union of the Ukrainian SSR, spurred by constant accusations against local artists for their dissenting artistic styles and nationalist spirit.Footnote ⁵⁴ The critique could personally target Emmanuil Mys΄ko, who was the head of the L΄viv Artists’ Union organization in 1966–81. Notably, Mys΄ko was commissioned for the monument to the professors around the same time as he worked on the L΄viv monument to military glory of the Soviet Army (1968–70).Footnote ⁵⁵ While the latter project was granted a prestigious award in 1972, the former one was not mentioned even in the post-1991 album “Emmanuil Mys΄ko. Sculpture.” Curiously, a picture of the model of the “vanished” monument was nevertheless reproduced in the album without any accompanying inscription (Figure 2).

Figure 2.

Model of the monument to the professors that disappeared in the 1970s. Sculptor Emmanuil Mys΄ko. Source: Emmanuil Mys΄ko. Skul΄ptura (Lviv, 1999), 17.

Yet another reason behind the demolition of Mys΄ko's monument might be the difficulties associated with inscribing a specific group memorialized on the Wulecki Hills into the official cult of the Great Patriotic War, which had been taking form since 1964. A letter from the Head of the L΄viv Regional Department of Culture, Yaroslav Vitoshyns΄kyi, dated July 8, 1968, indicates that local Soviet dignitaries likely initiated discussions about the monument mainly due to pressure from Polish milieus. It is worth quoting the letter at length, as it conveys the impression that the L΄viv regional authorities had difficulties with formulating a consistent and politically correct justification of the commemorative project:

Hence, the document proposed to consider the executed professors as both victims of and fighters against fascism; as an ethnically diverse group suitable for the “international education of workers”; as the “correct” sort of Poles deserving commemoration (unlike the soldiers of the Polish Legions); and as compatriots of the brotherly people of the PPR. It is especially noteworthy that Vitoshyns΄kyi mentioned Kazimierz Bartel, whose lifelike portrait on the unfinished monument was, according to rumors, the reason for its demolition. The letter confirms that the Soviet authorities knew what personalities they intended to commemorate, even though they had difficulties with devising an ideologically-acceptable formula. Social categorization of the fallen intelligentsia was quite problematic as, according to the emerging Great Patriotic War canon, the commemoration embraced primarily soldiers and an unspecified “peaceful population.” Representatives of the ideologically unreliable academia of the recently-annexed territories rhymed badly with the canonized narrative of the Great Patriotic War. Instead, on the wave of the monumentalization campaign that took place in Soviet Ukraine between 1966 and 1980, another monument was unveiled on the territory adjacent to the main building of the L΄viv Polytechnics.Footnote ⁵⁷ The sculpture titled “Flame” presented a young woman with a stylized Ukrainian embroidered belt around her waist and an open book and carnation in her raised hands.Footnote ⁵⁸ It was mounted in 1976 to honor “the staff and students of the Polytechnic Institute fallen in struggle with fascism in the Great Patriotic War.”Footnote ⁵⁹ To pay tribute to the collective wartime heroism of medics, the sculpture of the fairy-tale character Danko was unveiled on the territory of the L΄viv Medical Institute a bit earlier, in 1975.Footnote ⁶⁰ Although the biggest part of those executed on the Wulecki Hills were renowned local physicians, this fact was eclipsed by the memorialization of unspecified medics and metaphorical references to the self-sacrificial fight of the Soviet people. Also, commemorative projects located on the Wulecki Hills proved to be too controversial. Instead, throughout the whole Soviet period, L΄viv honored nameless heroic scientists in line with the official formula that was abandoned in Poland after 1981.

“A Monument without Inscription”: Commemorating the Lwów Professors after the End of the Soviet System

With the collapse of the socialist bloc and the declaration of Ukraine's independence in 1991, the idea of commemorating the executed professors with a monument in L΄viv gained new momentum. As the border between Poland and Ukraine was open and political relations largely amicable, Polish successors of the Lwów academic traditions managed to quickly establish institutional links with universities in L΄viv. Previous contacts and personal friendships, similar to those between the rector of the L΄viv Polytechnics, Yuri Rudavs΄kyi, and his counterpart from Wrocław, Andrzej Wiszniewski, played a crucial role in this process.Footnote ⁶¹ Nevertheless, the plan to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of the professors’ tragic death and erect a monument on the Wulecki Hills as a new project was put on ice partly for financial reasons, but also due to the changing political climate, in which the exclusivist rhetoric of national pride and grievances began to win the day on both the Polish and Ukrainian side of the border. In L΄viv, the only tangible evidence that the anniversary did not go unnoticed is a memorial plaque installed in the ancient Latin Cathedral, a place of paramount symbolic importance for the local Polish community. Thus, in this respect L΄viv repeated the pattern of Poland, where the postwar Catholic church played a key role in immortalizing national martyrdom, and was the first to reveal the murdered professors' names in a public space. Nevertheless, the academia kept up with the Catholic clergy in their determination to raise public awareness about the fate of the prewar Polish scientists. The first public event that brought the common academic legacy of L΄viv and Wrocław into the limelight was organized in 1994. An exhibition titled Forefathers and Fathers: The Achievements of Polish Graduates of the Architecture Faculty in the Lwów Polytechnics was launched by Prof. Olgierd Czerner, director of the Architecture Museum in Wrocław. Presented both in L΄viv and Wrocław, the exhibition made it clear that academic milieus of the two cities were not only inscribed into the same historical narrative, but also shared a remarkable institutional and personal ancestry.Footnote ⁶² A year later, in 1995, a memorial plaque was installed on the house of the prominent geodesist Prof. Kaspar Weigel who was shot on the Wulecki Hills.

In Ukraine, these events paved the way to public acknowledgement of the Polish academic legacy of the L΄viv Polytechnics in particular. The museum of the Polytechnics presently includes a number of exhibits referring to the executed professors, although as part of the overarching narrative about the academic staff's fate under the two totalitarian regimes, with a special focus on Soviet repressions. In the hall of the museum, one can see portraits of the professors side by side with images of OUN(b) leaders Stepan Bandera and Roman Shukhevych, who are much more familiar for the local audience. The questionable inclusion of these personalities in the pantheon of academic martyrs is justified by the anti-totalitarian narrative regarding the “repressed academia,” as these two Ukrainian nationalist leaders murdered by the Soviets in the 1950s were students of the Lwów Polytechnics before the war. The same logic is evident in the museum of the L΄viv National University, where only one exhibit refers to the murdered professors, namely the book by Zygmunt Albert, which is presented side by side with publications about postwar Ukrainian dissidents. Meanwhile, the permanent exhibition of the L΄viv Medical Academy Museum of History does not single out the murder of its prominent physicians whatsoever. The names of Franciszek Gröer, Jan Grek, and Antoni Cieszyński are mentioned, but in a celebratory context, as world famous scientists. Meanwhile, the exhibition focuses on those figures who, like Prof. Marian Panchyshyn, are better suited to a narrative about the contribution of Ukrainian science to the national liberation movement.

By the end of the 1990s, an imperative rule was added to the scenarios of Polish-Ukrainian commemorations that contributed to a regular war of words around commemorative inscriptions and definitions. In particular, the local identity of the murdered professors, that is, as residents of Lwów/L΄viv, was countered with the prescription of their (ethno)national belonging. A resolute and vocal proponent of the latter was the General Consulate of the Polish Republic in L΄viv.Footnote ⁶³ With its support, an unpretentious memorial resembling a gravestone was installed in 1995 at the site of the execution. It was dedicated to the “Polish professors of the Lwów institutions of higher learning, and members of their families,” and contained a table with the victims’ names. A bit later, a local branch of the Polish Society for the Care of Military Graves contributed a cross. Thereby, a provisional structure that came to be primarily due to efforts of local “memory entrepreneurs” was marked as a distinctly “Polish one,” becoming an easy target for vandals spraying anti-Polish slogans. Nevertheless, for nearly two decades the site and the associated event remained on the margins of local memory politics.Footnote ⁶⁴

In 2008, on the wave of increased interest in symbolic politics during Viktor Yushchenko's presidency, the mayors of L΄viv and Wrocław announced a project competition for a new memorial on the Wulecki Hills. The formal foundation for the cooperation was laid as early as 2002, when the two cities signed an official partnership agreement.Footnote ⁶⁵ Around that time, the idea of a monument to the professors began to look opportune and implementable. Curiously, our interviews with the involved officials and academics indicated that repeatedly, personal engagement and friendly relations between several influential actors (most importantly, between the mayors, Sadovyi and Dutkiewicz) were crucial for the success of the enterprise. A gentlemen's agreement was achieved thanks to active contacts, compatible cultural capital of the involved officials, and their shared visions of public good, rather than due to pragmatic political calculations or material interests.Footnote ⁶⁶

To speed up the construction of the monument in L΄viv, a fund-raising campaign was announced in the Polish media. While the project evoked enthusiasm in Poland, the attitude towards it in L΄viv was rather wary, especially when the rumor arose that the monument would be erected in front of the main building of the L΄viv Polytechnics.Footnote ⁶⁷ Nevertheless, the project competition ran smoothly. Among nearly thirty projects, a Polish-Ukrainian jury headed by reputed Ukrainian historian Yaroslav Hrytsak selected the work of Alexander Śliwa, an architect from Kraków. The funding was shared between L΄viv and Wrocław. L΄viv officials laid particular emphasis on the ethical justification, as the monument was said to be “a tribute to the past and not a political move.”Footnote ⁶⁸ Nevertheless, a purely pragmatic argument about the necessity to revitalize the territory adjacent to the campus of the L΄viv Polytechnics also played its role in the negotiations.Footnote ⁶⁹ The initial ambition to make the monument much higher, more visible and accessible from several sides was eventually withdrawn.Footnote ⁷⁰

Unveiled on July 3, 2011, on the 70th anniversary of the execution, the monument dedicated to the murdered professors became the second post-Soviet memorial landmark commemorating non-Ukrainians in L΄viv.Footnote ⁷¹ Although during the opening ceremony some cautious references to the Polishness of this memorial site were made (red and white colors, a choir of children wearing Krakówian-style costumes, and even the euphemistic phrase about “professors writing in the Polish language” dropped by the mayor Dutkiewicz), the monument bears no traces of national specificity.Footnote ⁷² It bears no inscription either. This detail surprised commentators in the Polish media and gave rise to many speculations.Footnote ⁷³ The design of the monument does include a bronze element that resembles a folded page, but it is left blank. It has been reported that, according to the initial plan, a German text of the execution warrant was to be carved there.Footnote ⁷⁴ Other accounts stated that no such inscription whatsoever was planned.Footnote ⁷⁵ According to yet another source, in 2011 the monument was left without inscriptions because the Polish and Ukrainian parties could not reach consensus on use of the adjective “Polish.”Footnote ⁷⁶ The formulation approved by the municipal authorities of L΄viv and Wrocław was rejected by the Polish government's Council for the Protection of Struggle and Martyrdom Sites, which insisted on the inclusion of the word “Polish” in the text. Nevertheless, in 2012, a granite stone dedicated in three languages to the “honor of the professors from L΄viv (in Polish, profesorów Lwowskich) murdered by the Nazis in 1941” was installed on the path leading to both the unsophisticated earlier monument and its aesthetically-accomplished official counterpart.

Conceptually, the memorial on the Wulecki Hills alludes to the Bible and emphasizes the sanctity of human life. The central part of the monument is an arch consisting of ten stones, symbolizing the Ten Commandments of God. The fifth stone, alluding to the Commandment “Thou shalt not kill,” protrudes from the structure (Figure 3).Footnote ⁷⁷ In the words of Prof. Bohdan Tscherkes, who headed the working group of the architects in charge of the monument, since 1991 the leitmotif of the commemorations of the professors was “In the face of science, like in the face of God, everyone is equal.”Footnote ⁷⁸ Thereby, the intention was to underscore the shared religious values, and so avoid a controversy that could be easily stirred up if the site had referred to iconic representations of Polishness alone.

Figure 3.

The monument to the Polish professors unveiled in L΄viv on July 3, 2011. The older monument from the 1990s is visible at the background. Photo by Eleonora Narvselius.

In the course of the commemoration of the 70^th anniversary of the murder on the Wulecki Hills, dialogue ran side by side with confrontation. From the Ukrainian side, confrontative rhetoric was employed by the ultra-right political party VO Svoboda. At a session of the L΄viv City Council, its representatives opposed opening the monument with the motivation that the Ukrainian authorities neglected public opinion and violated Ukrainian laws on property rights. During the opening ceremony, the Svoboda deputy who delivered his address on behalf of the L΄viv Regional Council, reproached Poles for their hostility to monuments of Ukrainian national insurgents erected on the Polish territory. Notably, while focusing on divisive rhetoric, where ‘yours’ and ‘ours’ were clearly demarcated, representatives of Svododa preferred to overlook that the construction of the monument in L΄viv was an initiative demonstrating common values of the two national and urban communities, among them the declared value of being a part of the democratic and peaceful Europe.Footnote ⁷⁹

Meanwhile, the joint commemoration was questioned not only by radical politicians from L΄viv, but also by the Polish side. In an article published shortly before the official opening ceremony, historian Piotr Łysakowski, affiliated with the Polish Institute of Memory (IPN), repeated the argument about the participation of Ukrainians in the murder of the professors.Footnote ⁸⁰ Overemphasis on two principal stakeholders in the commemorative event on the Wulecki Heights—the Polish and the Ukrainian ones—also resulted in a curious episode. The monument unveiling ceremony was attended by Dieter Schenk, the author of an award-winning book about the execution of the professors. The German historian had intended to participate in the official part of the opening and bring an apology for this particular crime of the Nazis but, similarly to the relatives of the professors, was not allowed to speak.Footnote ⁸¹ This episode indicated that the rigorously-staged commemoration became a matter of settling a feud between neighbors, a deal between the Polish and local Ukrainian communities. An apology of a repentant German could allegedly interfere with the bipolar orchestration of the Polish-Ukrainian commemorative ritual.

Overall, the monument on the Wulecki Hills was a successful commemorative closure that finally paid tribute to an important but for political and ideological reasons “inconvenient” group of WWII victims. As a next step in popularizing their memory, a special exhibition on the territory of the L΄viv Polytechnics campus was announced.Footnote ⁸² In 2011, this project remained unrealized, however, because of serious disagreements between the Polish and Ukrainian parties on its form and content. After 2014, warfare in Ukraine was the excuse to put the project on ice. In 2016, the seventy-fifth anniversary of the execution of the professors coincided with the resolution of the Polish Seim about the wartime massacres in Volhynia as a case of genocide committed by Ukrainian nationalists. That year, a sense of bitterness colored the ceremony in front of the monument that crowned the strenuous efforts of Polish and Ukrainian enthusiasts to find a common commemorative formula. Although both the Ukrainian and Polish delegations were represented by high dignitaries and the ceremony attracted media attention, the official addresses were clichéd and the atmosphere quite tense. In contrast, cordiality permitted a semi-official ceremony that was organized on the next day around the modest older monument built in 1995. The addresses of the speakers standing at the foot of the monument that lists the names of the murdered intelligentsia focused on the circumstances of their death and on the continuous efforts of local Poles to preserve their memory. After the ceremony, many participants stayed to talk and take pictures with acquaintances, priests, and Polish visitors invited to the event.Footnote ⁸³

The establishment of two different scenarios of commemoration on the Wulecki Hills that perform a contrast between the “official” and the “grassroots” prompts the conclusion that we are witnessing the transformation of the commemorative model formed in the 1990s. This “post-Soviet” model comes close to what Vered Vinitzky-Seroussi calls multivocal commemoration (allowing groups with different interpretations of the same past to hold ceremonies in a shared space, in a shared time, and with a shared scenario). Meanwhile, in the 2000s a competing model of fragmented commemoration became prevalent. Its core feature is “multiple commemorations in various spaces and times where diverse discourses of the past are voiced and aimed at disparate audiences.”Footnote ⁸⁴ Evidently, the discussed memory event and the accompanying commemorative practices were caught in the mainstream of the Polish-Ukrainian memory dispute that has become increasingly polarized since the beginning of the 2000s, when Poland gained accession to the EU, the visa regime between Poland and Ukraine was established, and heated discussions on Volhynian massacres and the Ukrainian nationalist insurgence turned into a “memory war.” The uniting potential of memory about the professors is still significant. Likewise, the idea that “in the face of science, like in the face of God, everyone is equal” did not lose its appeal among elites. Nevertheless, sad news about the defilement of the monument came out on March 10, 2017. The official monument that, as some Poles and Ukrainians maintain, symbolizes nothing more than a sanitized consensual approach, was suddenly turned into a new front line of the Polish-Ukrainian “memory war.”Footnote ⁸⁵