The National Museum-Memorial of Victims of the Occupation Regimes, or the Prison on Łącki (Street) (Ukrainian: Тюрма на Лонцького, romanized: Tiurma na Lontskoho) is a former detention center in Lviv, Ukraine, that throughout the 20th century was primarily used as a political prison of the Soviet and Nazi regimes.
The museum houses a main office of the Center for Research of Liberation Movement.[citation needed]
Name
The prison's name derives from the former name of the street upon which the main entrance was located.[citation needed] Formerly known in Polish as ulica Eliasza Łąckiego (Łącki Street), and today known in Ukrainian as vulytsia Karla Bryullova (Bryullov Street), the road is a side street of the main thoroughfare, vulytsia Stepana Bandery (Bandera Street). Łącki Street was named after Eliasz Łącki who was a Polish war hero of the 1672-76 Polish–Ottoman War during the 1672 siege of Lwów.
History
Austria-Hungary
The building complex was built in 1889–1890 at the intersection of ulica Sapiehy (today vulytsia Bandery) and ulica Kopernika on the project of architect Józef Kajetan Janowski.[citation needed] It is built in a Neo-Renaissance style and originally was designed for Austro-Hungarian Gendarmerie's main office in the city.
With the start of World War II in 1939 and the partition of the Second Polish Republic between Nazi Germany and Soviet Union, the prison was transformed into the NKVD Prison No.1 which was designed to accommodate 1,500 prisoners.[citation needed] The regional administration of NKVD took up quarters in the building. During the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union, the NKVD shot the prisoners held in the prison when Soviet forces retreated from Lviv, killing 1681 people.
In June and July 1941, the prison was the site of several atrocities committed by the OUN and the Nazi SS against the Jewish population of Lviv during the Lviv pogroms.[1]
In September 2010, the museum's director Ruslan Zabily was arrested by the SBU and detained for over 14 hours without a warrant, with his laptop and research material being confiscated, and was accused by the SBU of leaking state secrets.[citation needed] The Ukrainian Helsinki Human Rights Union described the arrest as "illegal," comparing it to a crackdown in Russia "against historians studying the history of political repression."[5] After being released Zabily held a press conference in which he accused the government of seeking to repress research into the history of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists.[4] In February 2011, Zabily was once again detained by the SBU and interrogated for five hours.[6]
Controversy
The National Museum-Memorial of Victims of the Occupation Regimes has faced criticism for minimising the crimes of the Nazi occupation regime during World War II and crimes committed by Ukrainian ultra-nationalists during the same period. Historian John-Paul Himka stated in 2015 that the museum "glides lightly over the Nazi occupation" and that it "glorifies OUN without mentioning or admitting that the militia associated with OUN was deeply involved in murders and other atrocities against Jews on the very premises of the Lontsky St. prison."[3] Alexandra Wachter of the University of Vienna stated in 2017 that the museum "focuses on the heroism of OUN and UPA activists and omits the local involvement in the Holocaust that might question this heroism," also saying that what Nazi material is presented in the museum is presented "without communicating its original propagandistic, anti-Semitic nature."[7]
