The Last Jew in Vinnitsa
is a photograph taken during the Holocaust in Ukraine showing a Jewish man near the town of Vinnitsa (Vinnytsia) about to be shot dead by a member of Einsatzgruppe D, a mobile death squad of the Nazi SS. The victim is kneeling beside a mass grave already containing bodies; behind, a group of SS and Reich Labour Service men watch
That photo of the execution and mass grave could have been that of my grandmother’s family from Lemberg, now known Lvov/Lviv. 2,500 Jews were shot in less than several hours.
All of my grandmother’s family and extended family were killed. She and her younger brother came to America in the early 1900s when Lemberg was still part of the old Austro-Hungarian Empire in the part often known as Galicia/the Pale. In fact, as a child, she saw Emperor Franz Josef when he visited Lemberg about 1909.