Beau­ti­ful, cul­tured Lem­berg, the ​“Vienna”of East­ern Europe, also known as Lvov, was the third largest city in Poland with the third largest Jew­ish pop­u­la­tion, after War­saw and Lodz. As the soul of Gali­cia, a vibrant Jew­ish cul­tur­al cen­ter for the hun­dreds of sur­round­ing towns, vil­lages, and shtetls, the destruc­tion of Lem­berg was par­tic­u­lar­ly trag­ic. This book gives the read­er a blow-by-blow descrip­tion of what hap­pened, when and how it hap­pened, and to whom it hap­pened. Lem­berg was the site of the Janows­ka death and tran­sit camp. It is the mass grave of more than 200,000 Jew­ish mar­tyrs, and was the rerout­ing point for anoth­er 500,000 sent to Belzec, the Nazis’ death fac­to­ry. Over 1,000,000 Jews were sys­tem­at­i­cal­ly mur­dered there. The Ukrain­ian mili­tia, worse than the Nazis, served these over­lords with fer­vor fed by avarice and hate — the hatred of the Ukrain­ian pop­u­lace unleashed in all its fury. Most of the Pol­ish and Ukrain­ian par­ti­san groups were also anti- Semit­ic and made life mis­er­able for any who con­tem­plat­ed escape; they were lit­tle more than rob­bers. In the shtetls, every depart­ment was giv­en a name that in actu­al­i­ty was the oppo­site of the nor­mal mean­ing of the word— the ​“Wel­fare Depart­ment” being mere­ly a tool for the roundup of Jews to be mur­dered, etc. Jews were made even more des­per­ate when they heard that among the dead were two of the most beloved rab­bis in Lem­berg, Chief Rab­bi Ezekiel Lewin and Rab­bi Ben­zion Hal­ber­stam (the ​“Bobover Rab­bi.”) This book is the most detailed indict­ment of the death and destruc­tion of a for­mer citadel of beau­ty and cul­ture, and the death of the Jews who once lived there. It is a nec­es­sary book for any Holo­caust library since there are few, if any, books devot­ed to Jew­ish Galicia.