On September 17, 1939, in accordance with secret agreements with Nazi Germany, the Red Army of the USSR, having violated the Polish-Soviet border, began a “liberation campaign.” It was nothing more than aggression against the Polish state, which had been resisting the German attack for three weeks.
The cities of eastern Poland, including Lviv, were devastated by German bombing in the very first days of World War II. Within a few days, the leaders of local governments and the townspeople in general realized that it was necessary not only to support their own army, but also to prepare the city for defense. The fight for it began on September 12 and lasted for ten days. It is worth noting that from September 19, the Polish army was opposed not only by units of the Wehrmacht, but also by parts of the Ukrainian Front of the Red Army. The Soviet command not only sought to establish control over Lviv, but also to prevent the organized withdrawal of Polish units to the Hungarian border.
On September 22, 1939, after three days of negotiations, the Lviv defense command decided to cease resistance and hand over control of the city to the Soviet military. Of course, this decision was extremely difficult from a moral point of view: some of the Polish defenders were outraged by the prospect of surrender and demanded to continue the fight. However, their voices did not have significant support.
One of those who took care of the defense of Lviv in September 1939 was the Vice President of Lviv (1930–1939) Viktor Hayes – a man with an interesting fate that ended tragically.
Victor (Vigdor) Hayes was born in Lviv on September 28, 1875. His parents belonged to the layer of Lviv Jews, who in the second half of the 19th century. embarked on the path of gradual assimilation with much of the city. Since studying at the Polish-language Franz Joseph Gymnasium, Victor has been active in various events that had a distinct Polish national and cultural color. Because of this, the young man never managed to complete his studies at the institution, the patron of which was “His Imperial Majesty”. In 1892, the restless Victor, a member of the Polish youth society “White Eagle”, even ended up behind bars for a short time when he drew and tore down posters that informed Lviv residents about Franz Joseph’s arrival in the city.
Not allowed to take the final exams, V. Hayes left Galicia for three years and went to Germany, where he studied at the Berlin Commercial Academy.
Judging by the further development of events, the Berlin years were not in vain. Already in 1900, together with his wife's brother, he founded the Schulz & Hayes Banking House - one of the most dynamic financial institutions, which successfully operated in Poland until the September Catastrophe of 1939.
In the pre-war year of 1913, V. Hayes was first elected to the City Council of Lviv – the city to which he, without exaggeration, dedicated his life. For a successful businessman, Jewish by origin and Polish by spirit, Lviv was, first, a Polish city. Therefore, it is not surprising that during the Great War, V. Hayes was an active supporter of the idea of creating the Polish Legions and supported the fact of the proclamation of Polish independence in November 1918.
In 1920, V. Hayes was among the initiators of a unique phenomenon for interwar Lviv – the Eastern Trades – an annual trade and industrial exhibition that was to transform the city into an influential Eastern European trade hub of the Second Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth[1]. In 1930, V. Hayes became one of the vice-presidents of Lviv and held this position until the beginning of the Soviet occupation. Being a clear patriot of the Polish state, V. Hayes participated in public projects that were of great importance for the Jewish community of Lviv. In 1930, Vice-President Hayes joined the so-called curatorship of the Jewish Museum of Lviv. In 1934, the official opening of the institution – the Museum of the Jewish Religious Community in Lviv took place. Interestingly, even though almost 3.5 million Jews lived in Poland, the Lviv Museum was one of the few cultural institutions in the country that cared about the preservation and dissemination of Jewish cultural heritage. Moreover, it was the only one that was completely free to visit[2].
The outbreak of World War II did not come as a surprise to V. Hayes. From the very beginning, he took an active part in ensuring the city's defense and created the Committee for Assistance to the Army. Like most Lviv residents, he met the news of the beginning of Soviet aggression with despair…
According to various sources, V. Hayes was arrested by the Soviet state security in late September - early October 1939. V. Hayes celebrated his last, 64th birthday in the Zamarstynivska prison in Lviv. The ominous symbolism was that on the same day, two totalitarian states - Nazi Germany and the communist USSR - agreed and fixed the division of the Second Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth in the text of the so-called Treaty of Friendship and Borders. So now they could safely begin “social transformations” in the occupied territories.
Until the spring of 1940, V. Hayes was held in prisons in Lviv, later he was transported to Starobilsk and Kyiv. It was in the capital of Soviet Ukraine that Viktor Hayes was shot in the NKVD building. His name, as well as the names of almost 3,500 other Polish citizens killed in the spring of 1940, were discovered in the so-called Ukrainian Katyn List (“Tsvetukhin List”) only in 1994[3]
Yehor Vradii
[1]In 1939, the grand opening of the Eastern Auctions was to take place on September 2. However, due to Germany's attack on Poland, this never happened.
[2]For more information about the history of the Jewish Museum in Lviv, see: Vladyslav Moskalets. “Museum of the Jewish Community in Lviv”. Interactive Lviv (Center for Urban History, 2024). URL: https://lia.lvivcenter.org/uk/organizations/jewish-museum/.
[3] Fedor Tsvetukhin (1904–1985) – an employee of the Soviet state security, in 1940 – a senior lieutenant of the state security, head of the 2nd department of the NKVD of the Ukrainian SSR. On November 25, 1940, under his signature, a list of citizens of the Second Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth (a total of 3,453 people) sentenced to death and killed on the territory of the Ukrainian SSR was sent to the NKVD of the USSR.