Lwów, Lviv, Lvov and Lemberg

by Keith Meredith

the last two hundred and fifty years and he'd also read that a nearly third of the population before the war had been Polish Jews. And what should we Brits call it? Since no-one he knew back home, apart from the two ex-Leopolitans themselves, had ever heard of the place anyway the question hardly arose. The principal station itself: Warszawa Centralna, had not existed on his first visit to the city in 1972. It was light and spacious, with a panoramic view through the large glazed area of the surrounding high-rise buildings, all but one of which-the mid -1950's gift from the old U.S.S.R. called the Palace of Culture-had also not been there in the 1970's. There was a post office at the station so it was possible to write a couple of postcards and send them to people back in Britain.

  For much of the journey to Kraków it was already dark. The journey passed without problem and was one of the fastest train journeys of the entire trip, a distance of a hundred and eighty miles being accomplished in two hours forty-eight minutes. If all the train journeys on the trip had been anything like this fast things would have been a deal simpler than they turned out to be. On arrival there it seemed to be an interminable walk from the bleak platform he had arrived at to the centre of life at the station. He wondered whether he should not have somehow managed to get to this city earlier but there was only one train to Lwów listed on the timetable, the one he was waiting for. After sitting for an hour in the spacious and attractive waiting room the train eventually was indicated as a red liquid crystal word; "Lvov". So, they were not even spelling it in the Polish way, instead using the Russian spelling, albeit in the Latin alphabet, even though this involved the letter V which does not actually exist in the Polish alphabet. The four letters looked strange amongst all the other station names on the board. There was a Western Union office where it was possible to buy some Ukrainian currency. But as the evening wore on the station got increasingly quieter and duller. When the time finally came to get on the train it turned out that his ticket was for a sleeping berth, hardly a sign of a quick journey. There was a mix-up about which was actually his sleeping berth but he did get one. He and two other men had somehow to stow their luggage, undress themselves to a greater or lesser extent and get in to their allocated bunk, be it upper, middle or lower, in that three foot by six foot space. By that time he had ascertained that the train would not arrive in Lwów until 6.00am-apparently seven hours to cover about a hundred and eighty miles-and he tried to make a night of it, managing somehow to change into nightwear, wipe over his face with a damp flannel (in theory there was a wash basin in the compartment but in practice one of the other blokes had put his luggage over it and there was no other space in the compartment he could have put it), cover himself with the bedding provided and even get two hours' sleep. There were many long stops in the journey. However, the passport and customs controls were not in themselves all that difficult or time-consuming. At some later stage the attendant brought some lemon tea, included in the price apparently. After he had managed to doze off the attendant announced that they had actually arrived in Lwów. His watch showed it to be five o'clock; well. they had to find some way or filling in seven hours and it looked as though one of those hours would be spent sitting in the Lwów station, so he turned over and hoped to doze off for a bit longer. But the others were getting their things together and leaving and the attendant arrived and said something that his limited knowledge of Polish was sufficient to understand as: we're here – in Lwów. What do you want to do, go on to Kiev? He got the message and, albeit leaving his pyjama jacket behind, managed to clamber down, dressed and with baggage, on to the bleak, poorly -lit platform that served as his first introduction to Leopolitan terra firma before the train moved off again. The first thing that happened was that a beggar accosted him. Getting away from the beggar he saw a station clock: ten past six. So, apart from everything else they had put Lwów in to a different time zone.

  He made his way down the steps, along the underpass, up in to the palatial main station building and out in to the city. It was still dark and he was still hoping to be admitted to his booked room in the hotel. As predicted from the street map he'd managed to buy in Britain there was a straight, wide thoroughfare leading a third of a mile in to the distance with a hint of an important road junction at its end. He knew that in Eastern Europe bus and tram tickets were bought in roadside kiosks and, armed with a carefully learned Ukrainian few words, managed to buy a book of tram tickets, though it was a bit puzzling why the man in the kiosk had to rummage around for an item which presumably people would be coming to buy every few minutes. He jumped on a tram about to leave. The standard vintage old East European tramcar slowly rattled and bumped its way along the broad avenue, which was dual carriageway and had a certain grandeur about it though not matched by the rag bag of drab storage and depot buildings on either side. A sense of being back in the old Soviet Union had not entirely gone: the apparent mixture of lack of pretentiousness, less competitiveness, less consumerism combined with an sense of common purpose with austerity, hardness and imposed lack of variety. It was reminiscent of earlier first impressions he had had in Eastern Europe: Yugoslavia in 1961, Czechoslovakia (Bohemia) in 1965, the USSR in 1966, Czechoslovakia (Slovakia) in the final hour and a half before the 1968 invasion, not to mention Poland in the 1970's. Of course, he had only just left the postwar Polish state but that had all but lost this general sense: the Ukraine clearly had not yet. "Had not yet" : that was just about it: on those occasions of forty years and more ago there was some positive element, that a new society was being built up that was alternative to our Western one and just might have something positive if not inspiring in it amidst the negative aspects. But in the Ukrainian State here and now the trend and the hopes seemed to be in the opposite direction.

  He alighted just after the road intersection when it was clear that the tram would not be going past the hotel. It should now be a straightforward walk along Gorodotska Street, except that at that moment all the streetlights went out although there was scarcely a hint of dawn. Relying on headlights of passing cars he picked his way back to the road junction, then along Gorodotska Street and, after five minutes or so, to the hotel. He had painstakingly learnt the Ukrainian for "Good day, I have a reservation for a single room, here is the confirmation, sorry I'm late" and started to blurt it out but the receptionist soon spoke in English, informing him that when he'd failed to show up at something like the expected time his reservation had been cancelled. After waiting around for half an hour or so the hotel staff confirmed that that there was now no room for him until the afternoon; so much for the extra sleep hoped for. They let him leave his luggage at reception, some sort of recognition of his vague right to be there he supposed. All that was possible was quick a wash at a washplace they had off the reception area and a half-hour's walk before the earliest breakfast was served. By now it was daylight and coming up to seven o'clock. The Gorodotska Street was a main road leading the further mile or so to the city centre. He crossed this road and walked along side streets with residential tenements, apparently dating from the decades up to 1914. These buildings, some four stories high faced with yellow ochre stucco or rendering, lined the streets and were occasionally punctuated at ground level by a shop or at an upper level by a bay window. Sometimes there was more to these buildings than met the eye from the street: more tenements flats grouped around courtyards that were approached via a pend from the street frontage. These latter flats were likely to have their windows looking on to this narrow space, reminiscent of what he had seen in the former Leningrad forty-five years before. Here in Lwów the courtyard entrances were sometimes fronted at the pavement by attractive iron gates. The area was quite intensely built up in fact. But it did not feel shut-in or oppressive, though he had not at that stage been in to any of the back courtyards. Some of the streets were tree-lined and in one place there was a narrow strip of open space with greenery and children's playground. Close inspection of the street name boards showed that, while they'd been up a long time, there were alongside
them the small holes in walls where the fixings of earlier name boards had been. Why would this have been unless to replace Polish street names with Ukrainian ones? By this time more people were up and about and, returning to the Gorodotska Street, he encountered one of the less pleasant aspects of Lwów: buses about half the normal size with about double the number of passengers that might be expected in Britain. As earlier there were no trams on this section of the Gorodotska's tram lines. He would walk any distance in the city not to ride one of those buses. By this time he was able to get breakfast at the hotel. The place seemed to date from some time before the First World War, when the city was in the Austro-Hungarian Empire and the restaurant had elegant yet solid decor and wooden bench seats with the a sense of an old central -European coffee house with a touch also of an old railway restaurant car. This was not entirely an accident as the hotel company had called the hotel Lviv Station (Dworzec Lviv, in fact using