3    

I LEFT LONDON for Lviv in late October, during a gap in my work schedule, after a hearing in The Hague, a case brought by Georgia against Russia claiming racial discrimination against a group. Georgia, my client, alleged that ethnic Georgians in Abkhazia and South Ossetia were being mistreated in violation of an international convention. I spent much of the first flight, from London to Vienna, reviewing the pleadings in another case, brought by Croatia against Serbia, on the meaning of “genocide.” The allegation related to killings that occurred in Vukovar in 1991, which led to the filling of one of the largest mass graves in Europe since 1945.

I traveled with my mother (skeptical, anxious), my widowed aunt Annie, who had been married to my mother’s brother (calm), and my fifteen-year-old son (curious). In Vienna, we boarded a smaller plane for the four-hundred-mile trip east, across the invisible line that once marked the Iron Curtain. To the north of Budapest, the plane descended over the Ukrainian spa town of Truskavets, through a cloudless sky, so we could see the Carpathian Mountains and, in the distance, Romania. The landscape around Lviv—the “bloodlands” described by one historian in his book on the terrors visited upon the area by Stalin and Hitler—was flat, wooded, and agricultural, a scattering of fields pockmarked with villages and smallholdings, human habitations in red, brown, and white. We must have passed directly over the small town of Zhovkva as Lviv came into sight, a distant sprawl of an ex-Soviet metropolis, and then the center of the city, the spires and domes that jumped “out of the undulating greenery, one after another,” the towers of places I would come to know, “of St. George’s, St. Elizabeth’s, the Town Hall, the Cathedral, the Korniakt and the Bernardine” that were so dear to Wittlin’s heart. I saw without knowing them the cupolas of the Dominican church, the City Theater, the Union of Lublin Mound, and the bald, sandy Piaskowa Hill, which “soaked up the blood of thousands of martyrs” during the German occupation. All these places I would come to know.

The plane taxied to a stop before a low building. It would not have been out of place in a Tintin book, as though we were back in 1923, when the airport enjoyed the evocative name of Sknyliv. There was a familial symmetry: the city’s imperial railway station opened in 1904, the year of Leon’s birth; the Sknyliv air terminal opened in 1923, the year of his departure; the new air terminal emerged in 2010, the year in which his descendants returned.

The old terminal hadn’t changed much in the intervening century, with its marbled hall and large wooden doors and the officious, fresh-faced guards dressed in green, à la The Wizard of Oz, barking orders without authority. We passengers stood about in a long line that snaked slowly toward a patch of wooden cubicles, occupied by grim immigration officers, each under a giant ill-fitting green cap.

“Why here?” the officer asked.

“Lecture,” I replied.

He stared blankly. Then he repeated the word, not once, but three times.

“Lecture? Lecture? Lecture?”

“University, university, university,” I responded. This prompted a grin, a stamp, and a right of entry. We wandered through customs, past dark-haired men in shiny black leather coats who smoked.

In a taxi, we headed to the old center, passing dilapidated nineteenth-century buildings in the style of Vienna and the great Ukrainian Catholic cathedral of St. George, past the old Galician parliament, into the main thoroughfare, bookended by the opera house and an impressive monument to the poet Adam Mickiewicz. Our hotel was close to the medieval center, on Teatralna Street, called Rutowskiego by the Poles and Lange Gasse by the Germans. To follow the names and maintain a sense of historical bearing, I took to wandering around with three maps: modern Ukrainian (2010), old Polish (1930), ancient Austrian (1911).

On our first evening, we searched for Leon’s house. I had an address from his birth certificate, an English translation prepared in 1938 by one Bolesław Czuruk of Lwów. Professor Czuruk, like many in that city, had a complicated life: before World War II, he taught Slavic literature at the university, then served as a translator for the Polish Republic, helping hundreds of Lwów Jews to obtain false papers during the German occupation. For these efforts, he was repaid with a period of incarceration by the Soviets after the war. With his translation, Professor Czuruk told me that Leon was born at 12 Szeptyckich Street and that he was delivered into the world by the midwife Mathilde Agid.

Today Szeptyckich Street is known as Sheptyts’kykh Street, close to St. George’s Cathedral. To walk there, we circled Rynok Square, admired fifteenth-century merchants’ houses, passed city hall and the Jesuit cathedral (which was shuttered during the Soviet era, used as an archive and book depository), then into a nondescript square in front of St. George’s, from which the Nazi governor of Galicia, Dr. Otto von Wächter, recruited members of the “Waffen-SS Galician Division.”

From this square it was but a short walk to Sheptyts’kykh Street, named in honor of Andrey Sheptytsky, the renowned metropolitan archbishop of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church who, in November 1942, published a pastoral letter titled “Thou Shalt Not Murder.” No. 12 was a two-story late-nineteenth-century building, with five large windows on the first floor, next to a building with a large Star of David spray painted onto a wall.

From the city archives, I would obtain a copy of the construction plans and early permits. I learned that the building was constructed in 1878, that it was divided into six apartments, that there were four shared toilets, and that there was an inn on the ground floor (perhaps the one run by Leon’s father, Pinkas Buchholz, although a 1913 city directory listed him as the proprietor of a restaurant a few buildings up, at No. 18).

We entered the building. On the first floor, an elderly man answered our knock, Yevgen Tymchyshn, born there in 1943, he told us, during German rule. The Jews had gone, he added. The apartment was empty. Inviting us in, his friendly yet shy wife proudly showed us around the extended single room that was the couple’s home. We drank black tea, admired pictures on the wall, talked of the challenges of modern Ukraine. Behind the tiny kitchen at the back of the house was a small balcony, where Yevgen and I stood. He wore an old military cap, Yevgen and I smiled, the sun shone, St. George’s Cathedral loomed as it had in May 1904.

12 Sheptyts’kykh Street, Lviv, October 2012