cover image Lvov Ghetto Diary

Lvov Ghetto Diary

David Kahane, David Kahana. University of Massachusetts Press, $25 (162pp) ISBN 978-0-87023-726-3

To Holocaust history, Tel Aviv rabbi Kahane here adds his witness, condemning Ukrainians for complicity with their Nazi captors in exterminating Jews. Only the Uniate Catholic Church is exempt from his rancor, for Metropolitan Archbishop Andrei Sheptytskyi; his brother, Abbot Kliment; and the monks sheltered the author during the Occupation, while his wife and three-year-old daughter found harbor in a convent. Kahane provides a virtual day-by-day account of conditions under which his coreligionists lived and perished in Lvov, from the July 194l capture of the city by the Germans to the July 1944 liberation by the Red Army. In recalling those war years, Kahane's anguish is manifest: ``Today . . . my heart still trembles with terror.'' So does the reader's. (Dec.)