East West Street, by Philippe Sands

I travelled with my mother (sceptical. anxious), my widowed aunt Annie, who had been married to my mother’s brother (calm), and my fifteen-year-old son (curious). In Vienna we boarded a smaller plane for the 650-kilometre trip east, across the invisible line that once marked the Iron Curtain. To the north of Budapest, the plane descended over the Ukrainian spa town of Truskavets, through a cloudless sky, so we could see the Carpathian Mountains and, in the distance, Romania. The landscape around Lviv — the ‘bloodlands’ described by one historian in his book on the terrors visited upon the area by Stalin and Hitler — was flat, wooded and agricultural, a scattering of fields pockmarked with villages and smallholdings, human habitations in red, brown and white. We must have passed directly over the small town of Zhovkva as Lviv came into sight, a distant sprawl of an ex-Soviet metropolis, and then the centre of the city, the spires and domes that jumped ‘out of the undulating greenery, one after another’, the towers of places I would come to know, ‘of St George's, St Elizabeth's, the Town Hall, the Cathedral, the Korniakt and the Bernardine’ that were so dear to Wittlin's heart. I saw without knowing them the cupolas of the Dominican church, the City Theatre, the Union of Lublin Mound and the bald, sandy Piaskowa Hill, which ‘soaked up the blood of thousands of martyrs’ during the German occupation. I would grow familiar with all these places.