Like a German in Alte Breslau

My first visit to Lwów/L'viv/Lvov/Lemberg was a deeply emotional affair. Since childhood Saturday mornings at Polish school in west London, 40 years ago, where we learnt of this city, torn away from Poland by the Yalta betrayal, Lwów has had a powerful hold on my imagination.

In the post-war Polish emigre communities in the UK, Lwów was everywhere. The stained-glass windows of Polish churches in Chiswick and Manchester with the crest of Lwów 'Semper Fidelis', the Koło Lwowian - the association of old Poles from Lwów that many of my parents' friends belonged to - my scout cub troop, named Orlęta Lwowskie (Lwów eaglets) for the children that took part in the fighting for a Polish Lwow in 1920, Lwów was as Polish as kiełbasa, bigos, krakowiak and polonez.

Communist Poland had a different shape to the pre-war maps adorning the living room walls of patriotic Poles living in West London. One day, Poland would be free. Would it revert to it's pre-war shape? Every Sunday, at the end of Mass we sang "Boże Coś Polske" in our churches: the last line - which still brings goose-pimples when I think about it - "Ojczyznę wolna, rać nam wrócić Panie." It occurred to me that so many people - praying so intently, for so long, for something to happen - it would happen. Even though in the darkest days it looked like the Evil Empire was there to stay and Poland's chances for independence were negligible.

But what about the borders of a free Poland? In the 1980s, opinions differed. I had a heated argument with Ryszard Czarnecki, today a leading light in the populist Samoobrona party, in the pub garden of the Haven Arms in Ealing Broadway in 1987. He called me a 'sprzedawczyk' (sell-out artist) for suggesting that a free Poland should not include a Lwów and a Wilno, but should retain the post-1945 borders. I argued that any claims that Poland might have for these two cities would be mirrored by German claims for Breslau, Stettin, Allenstein, Kolberg etc. And while Poland today is smaller than it was in 1939 by more than the size of Belgium and Denmark combined, it is now central rather than eastern Europe, ethnically homogenous and more industrial.

Visiting Lwów does leave me with an ambivalent feeling though. The saying that 'every cobblestone in Lwow is steeped in Polish history' rings true. The streets, cathedrals, churches, pre-war, pre-Partition Polish buildings, make the city feel every bit as Polish as Kraków. And it's larger than Kraków. While the Piast dynasty's Poland did not originally include Lwów, the city had been Polish for the best part of half a millennium. As I walked the pavements my forebears walked, I felt just like a German must feel in the Stary Rynek of Wrocław.

The sights are a marvel. There's a certain old house, where the drainpipes on one side feed rainwater into the Baltic while the drainpipes on the other feed rainwater into the Black Sea. The old cemetary chapel with its polychromed bas-reliefs. The Armenian cathedral. The dilapadated factories on the edge of the cities.

But ultimately, Lwów must stay Ukrainian. Poland needs good neighbours to the east. A strong, free and friendly Ukraine is crucial if Russia - which has had its fair share of leaders with bisyllabic names ending in '-in' - is not to threaten Poland's raison d'etat.

And while Poles will continue feeling strong sentiment for Lwów, the countryside around had never really been 'Polish'. It looks and feels different. Huge post-collective farm prairies rather than the narrow strips of Polish villages. Even before the deportations, ethnic cleansing and further deportations, the proportion of ethnic Poles living in the countryside around Lwow was low. My mother's childhood memories square with this.















Is this 1945? No, 2006. The old market square, L'viv.