Center for Urban History of East Central Europe
http://lod.ehri-project-test.eu/institutions/ua-006557 an entity of type: CorporateBody
The photographic holdings are the biggest part of the Urban Media Archive that represent the urban life of the cities from the late 19th century till now. As our institution is sited in Lviv the images of this city are dominant in our collection. Another part of the Urban Media Archive consists of moving images of different formats, mostly created in the second half of the 20th century. The digitized archive of Lviv Television covers the news programs released during the 1960s and 1970s. The collection of digitized 8mm and 16mm films and VHS (home movies, amateur films, video documentation) is the source of the history of everyday life, creative practices and public events in the region (1938-2008).
The collection of historical maps consists of over 200 high-resolution scans of city plans from the 17th to 20th centuries. Among the cartographic materials of the Urban Media Archive, there is the digitized scheme that represents the resettlement of the Jewish population to the ghetto in 1941.
Oral history interviews collected within research projects of the Center for Urban History are organized around topics related to the perception of space, professional biographies, and changes in urban space. The collection “Search for Home” tells the stories of people from Pidzamche district, one of Lviv’s oldest districts, the place of the Jewish ghetto during World War II, and a site for postwar industrialization. Based on materials from towns and villages in Lviv, Ternopil, and Ivano-Frankivsk regions, the collection “Social Anthropology of filling the Void” shows how the void was filled after representatives of social groups and ethnic communities were evicted by the violence during WWII and post-war changes.
Lviv Interactive (lia.lvivcenter.org) is a digital encyclopedia about the city and its past. Its main idea is to study and visualize history through places and spaces. Since 2007, the project has produced over a thousand entries on the history of buildings, organizations and figures. The texts prepared by scholars are combined with maps, photographs, archival materials and interviews. Lviv Interactive is focused on the history of the city from the late nineteenth century to the present. The main thematic focuses of the project are the history of architecture, urban planning, heritage, and cultural and social history.
The history of WWII and the Holocaust is considerable but still one of several topics in the project. The digital nature and encyclopedia format of Lviv Interactive, however, allows the creation of a network of connections and interrelations between various stories that are included in the project. This way, the history of the Holocaust here is also enriched with an urban angle and local context. It is also connected to a general history of the Jewish community in Lviv.
Among recent Holocaust-related publications, we prepared the history of the pogrom in Lviv in 1941, a map of the Janowska camp (ZAL-L, DAW), or a map of the Soviet POW’s camp in the city (Stalag 328). The stories of David Kahane, Leon Wells or Krystyna Chiger and her family show individual experiences and routes during the Holocaust in Lviv. We have also outlined the Holocaust topography in the city and the multiplicity of reactions to the Holocaust among non-Jewish residents of Lviv. We've also been working on mapping the ghetto addresses based on the ghetto registration cards.