THE MODERN POLISH FRONTIERS 383East, thus betraying their distant origins. But the youngsters, over 50 per cent of
the citizens, were all born here. As Polish Vratislavians, they feel themselves to
be the direct descendants of those ancient Slavs who lived on this same ground
over seven centuries ago. Their feelings, if understandable, are surely mistaken.
Like their ageing German predecessors, now coming to the end of a bitter exile
in the Federal Republic, they are the victims and the products of the Second
World War.^26
Similar exercises could be undertaken for almost all the cities of the
Recovered Territories and for all the former Polish cities incorporated into the
USSR. Szczecin, Koszalin, Gdansk, Olsztyn, Zielona Gora, Jelenia Gora,
Klodzko, Opole, are essentially new communities whose new Polish names cor-
rectly suggest the essential discontinuity with their previous German past.
'Vilnius', capital of the Lithuanian Republic contains only a fraction of the fam-
ilies who lived there in pre-war days. Its present-day rulers try to dismiss the five
centuries of its union with Poland as an irregular interruption in the city's nat-
ural progress. L'viv, capital of the Republic of Ukraine, contains only a fraction
of the families who inhabited inter-war 'Lwow', or Austrian 'Lemberg'. Yet
modern Ukrainians often talk as if it had always been 'their city' since time
began.
In reality, Soviet L'viv had been manufactured in the same artificial manner,
and for exactly the same reasons, as Polish Wroclaw. Baedeker, writing in the
1890s in the era of Galician autonomy, presented the picture of a city of essen-
tially Polish character overlain with official Austro-German overtones. Thirty
years later, in 1927, the Director of the Polish government's Tourist Office
stressed the Polish connections rather more strongly.^27 In his description of the
main landmarks, Dr Orlowicz drew his readers' attention to the Plac Marjacki
(St. Mary's Square) with Popiel's statue of Mickiewicz (1905); to the Sobieski
Museum in the Royal House on the Market Square, formerly the 'Ring'; to the
Wallachian Church (1580); and to the Cemetery of Lyczakow, with its special
section dedicated to the Orleta (the Young Eagles), the youthful defenders of
Lwow in 1918—19. In addition to detailed descriptions of Polish art and monu-
ments, he makes careful mention of Uniate-Ukrainian masterpieces in the
Dzieduszycki Collection, in the Ukrainian Muzeum founded in 1912, in the
Uniate Cathedral of St. George (1746) and in the church of 'St. Piatnyci' (1643).
Thirty-five years on, in 1962, a more modern Soviet guidebook combined the
Ukrainian and the Soviet versions of the city's history:
On the northern confines of the eastern Carpathians, on the River Polta, a tributary of
the Bug, lies one of the most beautiful, Ukrainian cities - ancient, 700-year-old L'viv.
Its history is rich and famous. It was founded in the middle of the thirteenth century
by Prince Danil Romanovitch, and named after his son, Lev. Together with the fortress
on the top of the hill, the city served as a point of resistance against the waves of Tartar-
Mongols attacking Europe.
In the fourteenth century, the lands of Galich-Volhynia sustained the invasion of
Polish, Hungarian, and Lithuanian feudaries. Undermined by the struggle with the