The history of a City, Building or any other Tourist Site seems to be mainly about facts and detailed descriptions of former events.
But even seemingly neutral reports and documentations always come from a specific perspective and are shaped by the opinions, education and biographies of the people or institutions who are making them.
Just like in the case of media it is almost impossible to be 100% neutral towards the discussed topic.
We as a group could make this experience also in our guided tour through Tyurma at Lonskoho (Prison at Lonskoho Street) in Lviv on Sunday, the third day of our program.
Built as a police station in the late 19th Century, it was used as a prison for political enemies by the polish, soviet and german occupators of Lviv and was turned into a Museum and Memorial Site for the victims of occupation in 2009.
The guide told us, that the prison was built from 1889 till 1890 and was originally designed for the Austro-Hungarian Gendarmerie citys main office. In 1918, when Lviv was a part of Poland, it was for the first time used as a prison. Especially Ukrainian nationalist were prisoners in this periode. When Lviv later got under Soviet occupation in 1939, the special police forces (NKVD) used the facilities. Before the German Wehrmacht arrived in 1941, the Soviets killed about 1000 prisoners. The German Propaganda used this fact. The Nazis filmed the dead people for an episode of the weekly propaganda magazine “Wochenschau”. Parts of this episode can be seen today in the museum. Because they ended the Soviet occupation, the Germans first had a warm welcome in Lviv. But in the time from 1941 until 1944 the Gestapo used the prison also for committing war crimes. After the Sovites took the City back in 1944, again the NKVD and later the KGB used the prison until 1994.
After the introduction in the history of the museum, we were able to enter the exhibition. For example, we looked into former prison cells and on the stories of different victims. Later we took the change and asked a lot of questions to our tour guide. Especially a few persons of our group had a critical view on the way the museum tells history, which lead us to an intensive and long discussion.
With its history, the Museum offers great insight into the history of the Ukrainian Nation, their people's struggle for freedom and independence and the oppression, torture and murder the ones who resisted faced. If you want to learn about the different occupators of Lviv and Ukraine, their ideologies and under which conditions they held their political enemies in the Prison at Lonskoho Street, the Museum is the perfect place for information, education and insight of the perspective of today's Ukraine on its past.
You should find a different source, if you want to find out about: Crimes and Murder committed by the Ukrainian Independence Movement and the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN), criticism of the Ukrainian-Nationalist Ideology or how and why Ukrainian Nationalists collaborated with German Gestapo and SS during German Occupation in World War 2. Because the museum won’t tell you much about these points.
Maybe there's not much to find out about, maybe an open discussion about this period of history could benefit Russian propaganda in the war in eastern Ukraine or the founders of Lonskoho Museum don't have any interest in touching these questions - either way this guided tour showed me, how the writing of history shapes today's politics, culture and narrative of history.
