[1] On 28 September 1939, after the joint Soviet-German invasion, the USSR and Germany signed the German–Soviet Frontier Treaty, which assigned about 200,000 km2 (77,000 sq mi) of Polish territory inhabited by 13.5 million people of all nationalities to the Soviet Union.

[2] At the time of the German attack on the Soviet Union on 22 June 1941, about 160,000 Jews lived in the city;[3] the number had swelled by tens of thousands due to the arrival of Jewish refugees from German-occupied Poland in late 1939.

Jews were taken from their apartments, made to clean streets on their hands and knees, or perform rituals that identified them with Communism.

[14][15] This pogrom was organized by the Nazis, but carried out by the Ukrainians, as a prologue to the total annihilation of the Jewish population of Lwów.

Between 16 March and 1 April 1942, approximately 15,000 Jews were taken to the Kleparów railway station and deported to the Belzec extermination camp.

Following these initial deportations, and death by disease and random shootings, around 86,000 Jews officially remained in the ghetto, though there were many more not recorded.

During this period, many Jews were also forced to work for the Wehrmacht and the ghetto's German administration, especially in the nearby Janowska labor camp.

Between 10 and 31 August 1942, the "Great Aktion" was carried out, where between 40,000 and 50,000 Jews were rounded up, gathered at transit point placed in Janowska camp and then deported to Belzec.

After this aktion in January 1943 Judenrat was dissolved, that what remained of the ghetto was renamed Judenlager Lemberg (Jewish Camp Lwów), thus formally redesigned as labor camp with about 12,000 legal Jews, able to work in the German war industry and several thousands illegal Jews (mainly women, children and elderly) hiding in it.

As Nazis entered the ghetto they met some sporadic acts of armed resistance, facing grenades and Molotov cocktails.

By the time that the Soviet Red Army entered Lwów on 26 July 1944, only a few hundred Jews remained in the city.

The number varies from 200 to 900 (823 according to data of Jewish Provisional Committee in Lwów, Polish: Tymczasowy Komitet Żydowski we Lwowie from 1945).

Kazimiera Nazarewicz, a Polish nanny hired by a Jewish family, sheltered their daughter throughout the war, and delivered aid to her parents who were imprisoned in the ghetto.