Tourists fill the streets of Lviv year round ever since budget European airlines added Danylo Halytskyi International Airport to their destinations.
What they don't see of course is the hidden history, what has been pushed out of sight, what is rarely discussed.
The Lviv Holocaust has become a kind of modern-day mythology, of no interest to young Ukrainians and apparently not well known to their parents, even grandparents.
Post-war Soviet censorship and ignorance is partly to blame. Denial is the main reason.
Ultimately, obfuscated Ukrainian history has created modern Lviv, city of (un)memory.
Lviv is a City built on Bones. Execution sites, death pits and mass graves surround us. Not commemorated, certainly not musealized, often vandalised, always disrespected.
Memorial plaques where the Progressive Synagogue (Tempel) and Great Synagogue once stood have become signposts for alcoholics.
Nationalist memorials and florid memorial spaces such as the "Memorial of the Heavenly Company Heroes" for 100 armed protestors (Maidan, 2014) are cropping up everywhere.
One must ask why, at Lysynychi and many other places in Lviv where 100,000+ unarmed civilians were brutally murdered, memorial spaces are, let's say, "verboten".
New hotels, apartments and supermarkets are being built over historical sites where unspeakable violence happened. This is the modern Lviv Holocaust and the vast majority of Ukrainians are doing nothing about it.
From 1941 until early 1945, Occupied Poland comprised Generalgouvernement, Distrikt Galizien, and Reichskommissariat Ukraine. They covered most of what is now modern Poland and Western Ukraine.
When the Nazis arrived in Lviv with Ukrainian nationalists, pogroms began. City locals and villagers from the outskirts, ferried in by Lviv nationalist leaders, beat, raped and murdered thousands of people.
Many of the victims were neighbours, acquaintances and co-workers of the perpetrators.
When the ghetto was created, 500 years of Jewish culture and history in Lviv ended, but the brutality did not end with Lviv's Jews.
Hungarian Jews were massacred in forests near Lviv, European POWs suffered the same fate, while Poles and Ukrainians who fought against the Nazis were sent to Janowska.
Many people were deported from Klepariv station to Bełżec, Auschwitz and Sobibór, but most were murdered behind Janowska camp, in the ghetto, Lysynychi forest, and at dozens of other sites in Lviv and nearby.
Approximately 160,000 people were murdered in Lviv or deported from Lviv to be murdered elsewhere between 1941-1944. That is an absolutely huge number for a small city.
Our aim is to connect modern Lviv, city and citizens, with difficult questions about why the genocide that happened here has been largely forgotten, indeed, deliberately ignored.