Tourists fill the streets of Lviv year round ever since Ryanair, Wizzair, and other cheap airlines decided to fly to Danylo Halytskyi International airport.
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.
Obfuscated Ukrainian history has created modern Lviv, city of (un)memory.
Lviv is a city built on bones. Mass execution sites and mass graves surround us. Not commemorated, certainly not musealized, often vandalised, always disrespected.
Memorial plaques installed where the Progressive Synagogue 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" are cropping up everywhere.
One must ask why, at Lysynychi and many other places in Lviv where more than 100,000 unarmed civilians were brutally murdered, memorial spaces are, let's say, "verboten".
Hotels, housing developments, supermarkets and children's playgrounds are being built on historical sites where unspeakable violence happened. This is the modern Lviv Holocaust and the vast majority of Ukrainians are doing nothing about it.
Between 1941 and early 1945, Occupied Poland comprised Generalgouvernement, Distrikt Galizien, and Reichskommissariat Ukraine. They covered most of what is now Poland and Western Ukraine.
When the Germans arrived in Lviv with Ukrainian nationalists, pogroms began almost immediately. City locals and villagers from the outskirts, invited to participate by nationalist leaders, beat, raped and murdered thousands of people.
We know that some victims were known to the perpetrators, meaning neighbours and co-workers.
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 and thousands of European POWs suffered the same fate. The Poles and Ukrainians of Lviv who fought valiantly against Nazi occupiers, some of whom tried to protect Jewish people, were sent to Janowska and shot.
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.
Approximately 160,000 people who lived in Lviv in 1941 were murdered between that fateful year and 1944. An absolutely huge number for a small city.
My aim is to connect modern Lviv, city and citizens, with important questions about why the genocide that took place here has been largely forgotten, indeed, deliberately ignored.