History
By July 2, 1941, many of the initial terror actions were halted, yet the individual, planned executions continued. At approximately 3 o'clock in the evening Prof. Kazimierz Bartel was arrested by one of the Einsatzgruppen operating in the area.
During the night from 3 to 4 of July, several dozen professors and their families were arrested by German detachments - each one consisting of an officer, several soldiers, Ukrainian guides and interpreters. The lists were prepared by their Ukrainian students associated with OUN. Some of the professors mentioned on the lists were already dead, specifically Adam Bednarski and Roman Leszczyński. Among arrested was professor Roman Rencki, a director of the Clinic for Internal Diseases at Lwów University, who was kept in NKVD prison and whose name was also on the list of Soviet prisoners sentenced to death. The detained were transported to the Abrahamowicz's dormitory, where despite the preconceived intention to kill them, they were tortured and interrogated. The head of the department in the Jewish hospital, professor Adam Ruff was shot while having an epileptic attack.
In the early morning of July 4 one of the professors and most of his servants were set free while the rest were either brought to the Wulka hills or shot dead in the courtyard of the Bursa Abrahamowiczów building. The victims were buried on the spot, but several days after the massacre their bodies were exhumed and transported by the Wehrmacht to an unknown place.
According to a Polish historian the victims were not involved in politics in any way. According to a Ukrainian historian, out of approximately 160 Polish professors living in Lviv in June 1941, the professors chosen for execution were specifically those who actively cooperated with the Soviet regime in some way between 1940-1941.
Read more about this topic: Massacre Of Lviv Professors
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“Every generation rewrites the past. In easy times history is more or less of an ornamental art, but in times of danger we are driven to the written record by a pressing need to find answers to the riddles of today.... In times of change and danger when there is a quicksand of fear under mens reasoning, a sense of continuity with generations gone before can stretch like a lifeline across the scary present and get us past that idiot delusion of the exceptional Now that blocks good thinking.”
—John Dos Passos (18961970)
“It would be naive to think that peace and justice can be achieved easily. No set of rules or study of history will automatically resolve the problems.... However, with faith and perseverance,... complex problems in the past have been resolved in our search for justice and peace. They can be resolved in the future, provided, of course, that we can think of five new ways to measure the height of a tall building by using a barometer.”
—Jimmy Carter (James Earl Carter, Jr.)
“Regarding History as the slaughter-bench at which the happiness of peoples, the wisdom of States, and the virtue of individuals have been victimizedthe question involuntarily arisesto what principle, to what final aim these enormous sacrifices have been offered.”
—Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (17701831)