Awful atrocities were carried out at the Janowska concentration camp and surrounding Lvov(aka Lwow and Lviv) by the Nazis, Soviet troops and Ukrainian nationalists. To an extend it reminds me of the current situation in Aleppo where the population is being subjected by violence from all sides.
In September 1941, the Germans set up a factory on Janowska Street in the northwestern suburbs of Lvov, in southeastern Poland(today Lviv in Ukraine). This factory became part of a network of factories, the German Armament Works, owned and operated by the SS. Jews were used as forced laborers, mainly in carpentry and metalwork. In October 1941, the Germans established a camp housing the forced laborers next to the factory.
After the Nazi-Soviet invasion of Poland at the beginning of World War II, the city of Lwów in the Second Polish Republic(now Lviv, Ukraine) was occupied in September 1939 by the Soviet Union under the terms of the Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact.
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Janowska wasn’t only for Jews, though about 80% were. My mother was there for a whole year. She told me stories about the sadism of the camp commandant, Wilhous –there was another one just as bad before him- that freeze one’s blood. Notably, a German guard told her to jump from the truck on her way to the uniform sewing/ ironing works where she was a slave laborer. That was 4 days before the camp’s “Liquidation” — i.e. mass murder of the remnant. There is a famous memoir by Leon Weliczker who was on the Sonderkomando team that had been ordered to burn and grind into dust tens of thousands of Janowska victims’ bodies in shallow mass graves. The Germans–and Austrians as it were–were keen on erasing evidence of their evil deeds.