The Ukrainian city of Lviv, once a major center of Jewish life in Eastern Europe, is commemorating the 75th anniversary of the annihilation of the city's Jewish population by Nazi Germany and honoring those working today to preserve what they can of that vanished world.
City authorities honored recipients during a ceremony Sunday with 75 sculptured glass keys modeled by an American artist on an old metal synagogue key that she found at a Lviv market. The commemorations, including a concert amid the ruins of synagogues, come amid a larger attempt to revive the suppressed memories of the Jews who were once an integral part of life in the region.
"God forbid our city once suffered such a misfortune," Lviv Mayor Andriy Sadovyi said at the ceremony. "Today we cannot even imagine for a moment the pain, humiliation and grief that thousands of Lviv's people suffered in the last century."
In the postwar years, with Ukraine part of the Soviet Union, the memories of the murdered Jews began to vanish. Historian Omer Bartov has called the area a "land of memory and oblivion, coexistence and erasure, high hopes and dashed illusions."
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