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[PIANO MUSIC PLAYING]
Western Ukraine is a part of the world that knows about the horrors of extreme polarisation, of conflict between groups. The victims in this area have been many and varied as control has changed hands during and since the second world war. And the legacy is still great today.
The new generation in Ukraine is one that is hungry for ideas. They want to know their histories, and they want to know what the elders have not talked about in the past.
In the city of Lviv, I've returned on a cold November weekend. Mayor Andrii Sadovyi has decided to honour Hersch Lauterpacht and Raphael Lemkin, two legal sons of the city who are largely forgotten here, but who changed the world with their ideas, putting crimes against humanity and genocide into international law in 1945.
Saturday evening is spent at Lviv's Philharmonic Hall. The great pianist Emmanuel Ax has travelled from New York. He was born here in Lviv in 1949 and left in 1956.
This is his first ever performance in the city of his birth. Nearby Zhovkva, so-called Zolkiew, which we visit on Sunday is a rather less joyous place. It was once a thriving intellectual and commercial hub, but today it's rather sad.
We walk along its East West Street, from the spot where Lauterpacht was born towards that spot where my great grandmother lived. On the way we visit a tiny underground cellar, little more than a metre high, where 17 Jewish inhabitants survived the war for two years.
Unlike Lviv, this small town hasn't even begun to start to engage with its past, with the murder of half the population on a single day on March the 25th, 1943. We visit the spot in the forest where these acts of killing occurred, a place I discovered only because of Lyudmila Bybula, a local resident with the courage to break the silence.
I read aloud from the account of a solitary survivor.
In response, he ostentatiously took his wife's arm on one side and his child's on the other. And thus united, they walked to their deaths with their heads held high.
A gentle wind blows through the reeds. We return later to the warmer embrace of Lviv. I know from my work in courtrooms, the stories of horror, past and present, are never easily shared. What I've learned over these days is that words can help and that music can help even more.
