Einsatzgruppen C (mobile killing squad) and local collaborators were capable of killing thousands of people per day. On several occasions they did just that in Lysynychi and Kryvchytsi.
Today, these are adjacent suburbs on the edge of Lviv. There are no modern buildings or commercial developments nearby, but the areas are populated.
For a great many Ukrainian families, they are home sweet home. The brutal history that surrounds their happiness needs to be known. Here we are.
Eyewitness reports matter above all. One describes how dozens of army trucks carrying Jewish people pulled up at Lysynychi between early morning and dusk every day for weeks.
Other witnesses have described people being taken to "Peskovyi", "piaski" at Lysynychi and we know the latter term from Janowska, i.e. a quarry, ravine, or clearing.
In 1943, malodorous bonfires could be seen and sensed by the population of Lviv; captors, captives, collaborators, bystanders. Burning corpses.
We know that some Jewish people had to walk several kilometres to the forests where they would die. The route from Lviv was and still is uphill.
By consulting eyewitness evidence and studying topography that has not changed since 1944, I have identified the exact area where mass murder was carried out.
It is the most significant Holocaust site in Ukraine and it is derelict. Abandoned.
Not exactly abandoned. Private residences have been built on land that borders the Lysynychi mass execution site to the north and west. That genocidal carnage preceded their construction - unimportant. Did it even happen? The streets are deathly calm.
Sonderaktion 1005 erased all the evidence in late 1943 (when mass graves were exumed and burned), not unlike how modern Western Ukraine strives to revise it's own murky history in the same period.
One scientific study has published a figure of over 100,000 Lysynychi dead. Thousands of Italian and Hungarian POWs were also brought to these quiet forests south east of Lviv and executed.
At time of writing, June 2025, there is no memorial. Barbed wire, overgrown pathways, broken bits and pieces of long-forgotten structures that may have accommodated perpetrators are all that remain.
I will organize independent forensic soil analyses in Lysynychi and Kryvchytsi. I will deliver a proposal to Lviv City Council regarding the construction of an appropriate memorial and information points.
From 14.03.2026, news relating to Lysynychi forest will be posted here and linked from Lviv News. LHRF is the only website about The Holocaust in Lviv, Ukraine that is updated regularly.
Photo I People were transported here in trucks and possibly wagons by rail.
Photo II Modern homes. Tens of thousands of people were executed nearby.
Photo III Photo taken from the side road which runs parallel to the railway line.
Photo IV At least 100,000 people were killed. There is nothing to remember them.
Photo V 150 metres from the side road is a ravine. Only barbed wire remains.
Photo VI The yeast factory nearby as remembered by witnesses is still working (Enzym Biotech).
