Einsatzgruppen C 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 adjacent locations lie just outside Lviv. There are no modern buildings or commercial developments nearby, but the areas are populated.
For plenty of Ukrainian families, they are home sweet home. The truly shocking history that surrounds their happiness needs to be known. Here we are.
Eyewitness reports matter most. One describes how dozens of trucks full of Jewish people arrived at Lysynychi between early morning and dusk every day for weeks.
Others describe people being taken to "Peskovyi", "piaski" at Lysynychi and we know the latter term from Janowska, i.e. a quarry, ravine, or space of similar topography and geologic features.
In 1943, huge bonfires were seen in the forests. Thousands of burning corpses.
We know that some Jewish people had to walk to the forests to die, a distance of several kilometres and mostly uphill.
Using eyewitness evidence obtained by Soviet liberators, and the wide ravine still there today as in 1944, a specific area identified by our experts is precisely 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 - irrelevant. 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. Many Italian and Hungarian POWs were brought to these forests south east of Lviv and executed.
At time of writing, June 2025, there is no memorial. Rusty barbed wire, overgrown pathways, broken structures that may have accommodated perpetrators, and a dreadful atmosphere prevail.
Our aim is to organize independent forensic soil analyses in Lysynychi and Kryvchytsi. A proposal to Lviv City Council regarding the construction of a memorial and unbiased information points will be delivered.
GALLERY PHOTO I People were transported here in trucks and possibly wagons by rail.
GALLERY PHOTO II Modern homes. Tens of thousands of people were executed nearby.
GALLERY PHOTO III Photo taken from the side road which runs parallel to the railway line.
GALLERY PHOTO IV At least 100,000 people were killed. There is nothing to remember them.
GALLERY PHOTO V 150 metres from the side road is a ravine. Only barbed wire remains.
GALLERY PHOTO VI Trucks unloaded people. The yeast factory (Enzym Biotech today) as remembered by eyewitnesses can be seen behind the trees.
