Lonzki prison

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The Lonzki Prison ( Ukrainian Тюрма на Лонцького Tjurma na Lonzkoho ) in Lviv was a prison of the western Ukraine and today is an important place of remembrance for the totalitarian past in the Ukraine .

The Lviv prison was built in the years 1889-1890 at the intersection of the former Lonzki Street (Polish Ulica Łąckiego) and Kopernikus Street according to the design of the architect Józef Kajetan Janowski.

Lonzki prison in Lviv, 2010
Courtyard of the former prison
Prison wall with gate to the courtyard

history

The building complex was designed in neo-renaissance style for the main office of the Austro-Hungarian gendarmerie of the city. The part where the prison was located was built in 1918–1920 when Lviv was part of the Second Polish Republic . Since then, the building has been used as a political prison throughout the 20th century. Before the Second World War it was the 4th Department of the Polish State Police, which unofficially held political prisoners (including members of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists or the Communist Party of Western Ukraine). After the outbreak of war in September 1939 and the invasion of Galicia by the Soviet Army as a result of the Hitler-Stalin Pact , the Soviet political secret police NKVD resided here from 1939 to 1941 and used the prison as a pre-trial detention center. According to the latest research, up to 400 prisoners were imprisoned here at the same time. When the German Wehrmacht occupied the city, 362 (the number of exhumed bodies) were murdered. The murder of the prisoners in the Lviv prisons was used to justify the mass murders in Lviv in the summer of 1941 by occupiers and Lviv residents. During the time of the German occupation, the Gestapo remand prison and the security service of the Reichsführer SS's security service were housed on Lonzki Strasse . The prison yard was paved with tombstones from the old Jewish cemetery. The Germans held part of the city's elite in prison. Many prisoners were murdered during the occupation. With the Lviv uprising of the Polish Home Army , the last prisoners were released. The Red Army occupied Lviv shortly afterwards. Since 1944 the building has been used again by the NKVD and its successor organizations, the MGB and KGB . First, members of the Polish Home Army were detained and interrogated here. In 1945 Roman Aftanazy, who saved the Ossolineum library from Soviet access, was imprisoned here. Even after the fall of the Soviet Union, the building remained a prison for the first years after Ukraine gained independence. It was used as a remand prison by the Ukrainian secret service SBU . In 1996 it was finally closed.

museum

In 1997, in front of the prison, a memorial to the “Victims of Communist Crimes” was erected on Shashkevich Square. As a result of an initiative also supported by the Lviv City Council and the Lviv Regional Council, a memorial and a museum ( Національний музей “Тюрма на Лонцького” ) was set up in the building supported by the Security Service of Ukraine on June 29, 2009 . Kateryna Yushchenko and the then head of the Security Service of Ukraine Valentyn Nalywajchenko were also present at the opening ceremony . The exhibition was financed u. a. through the Kateryna Yushchenko Foundation. At the end of 2009, the President of Ukraine Viktor Yushchenko signed a decree that gave the memorial national importance. From mid-2010, the SBU began to put pressure on the museum's administration and hinder its work. In September 2010, the museum's director Ruslan Zabilyi was confiscated and charged with treason. Over 140 historians showed their solidarity with the association and the Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper visited the museum at the end of October 2010. By decree of the Cabinet of Ministers of Ukraine , state responsibility for the museum changed from the Ministry of Security to the Ministry of Culture on October 10, 2011. The case against Ruslan Sabilyi was closed in January 2012. The museum consists of three parts. One part is dedicated to the history of the building, another part to the Soviet mass murders in June 1941 and part of the second Soviet period. Ruslan Sabilyj named the Eastern European context as the aim of the exhibition: “It's about how people resist the system and what the system does to people.” Lonzki remand prison was not the largest prison in Lviv. There were over 3,600 inmates in Brygidki Prison in 1941. Before leaving the city, 981 of them were shot. Death sentences were still being carried out here in the 1980s.

Foreign policy significance

A diplomatic scandal broke out in November 2017 when the then Polish Foreign Minister Witold Waszczykowski turned around in front of the museum's entrance door and drove away. Before that, he laid a wreath opposite the museum at the memorial for victims of communist crimes. At the entrance to the museum he asked the director Ruslan Sabilyj whether western Ukraine was occupied (by Poland) in 1918. Sabilyj said: Yes, it was an occupation. Waszczykowski then turned around and did not visit the museum. Since no specific area in the museum is dedicated to the victims of German terror (especially the Jews and the Polish resistance), the location remains under criticism.

Web links

Commons : 1 Bandery Street, Lviv  - Collection of pictures, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c Kai Struve in Ukraina Moderna (September 2018), http://uamoderna.com/md/struve-lonckoho
  2. ↑ Jörg Lüer: 'A Century of Violence: The former prison on Lonski-Strasse in Lemberg / Ukraine', East-West. European Perspectives 1/2014 https://www.owep.de/artikel/1125/jahrhund-gewalt-ehemalige-gefaengnis-an-lonski-strasse-in-lembergukraine and Tarik Cyril Amar: 'The Paradox of Ukrainian Lviv', New York 2015, pp. 88ff.
  3. ↑ List of signatories on the website of the Kharkiv Human Rights Protection Group (KhPG) http://khpg.org/index.php?id=1284550630
  4. ↑ Juri Durkot: The Epitome of Political Persecution in the 20th Century. About the “Lonzki Prison” museum in Lemberg , western Ukraine , in: Gerbergasse 18 , issue 73 (4/2014), pp. 37–40, p. 40
  5. ↑ Lviv city portal (Ukrainian) to the Brygidki prison: http://portal.lviv.ua.tilda.ws/
  6. ^ Announcement on UNIAN on November 5, 2017 https://www.unian.ua/politics/2226489-ministru-zakordonnih-sprav-polschi-yakiy-z-vizitom-u-lvovi-ne-spodobalas-vidpovid-ukrajinskogo-istorika .html

Coordinates: 49 ° 50 ′ 3.4 ″  N , 24 ° 1 ′ 9 ″  E