My First Encounters with Jews and Ukrainians

Abstract

This chapter details the author's experiences with the Jewish question in Lwów. Lwów was a city of Poles, Jews, and Ukrainians, a city of acute antagonisms. Here, the chapter details the author's experiences with the cult of the ‘Orlęta’, who fought to win the city for Poland in 1918. It also shows how the author became fascinated by what was different about the others. This was when the author was becoming increasingly involved in what was then called internationalism but today might better be described as a kind of universalism. From there, the chapter describes the author's experiences with the Holocaust. Although the author lived on the ‘Aryan’ side, they had met people from the other side of the wall, the ‘non-Aryan’ part. Moreover, outside Lwów there was a death camp, and outside Janów there was a labour camp.