- June 30, 2026
- 4:59 pm
- Ukraine
On June 30, 2026, at the VEBF club “Hesed-Arie” a program took place “The City of the Lion in the Life and Works of Stanisław Lem”, dedicated to the 105th anniversary of the birth of Stanisław Lem — one of the most famous European science fiction writers, thinkers of the future, and authors whose books have long transcended the genre of science fiction.
It was not just a literary meeting.
It was a conversation about Lviv as a city of memory, about Jewish fate, about Polish culture, about the trauma of the Holocaust, and about a man who could look far ahead but remained connected to the city of his childhood all his life.
Stanisław Lem was born in Lviv on September 12, 1921. At that time, it was Lwów — a city with a complex, multilingual, and multicultural history, where Polish, Jewish, Ukrainian, German-speaking, and Austrian cultural traditions coexisted. This city became the first universe for the future writer, which he later returned to in his texts — directly, indirectly, through memory, details, images, and internal scars.
Lem and Lviv: the city that remained inside
In the Hesed program, they recalled the childhood and youth years of Stanisław Lem in Lviv, reflected in his autobiographical book “High Castle”. In this text, Lviv appears not as a tourist postcard, but as a space of childhood perception: streets, houses, smells, games, fears, first discoveries, the feeling of a big world that begins near home.
For Lem, Lviv was not only a place of birth.
It was a city of personality formation, language, memory, and an intellectual view of the world. He grew up in an environment where medicine, education, literature, European culture, and urban life were part of everyday life. His father, Samuel Lem, was a doctor, and his mother, Sabina Woller. The family was well-off, Polish-speaking, and fully assimilated, but by origin belonged to the Jewish community of Lviv.
Here, precision is important.
Lem cannot be reduced to one simple formula. He was a Polish writer, a Lvivian, a man of European culture, and by origin — a Jew from a family that survived the catastrophe of the 20th century. Such a complex identity is well known to many Jewish families in Eastern Europe: language, culture, documents, origin, memory, and survival often did not align into one convenient line.
For the Israeli audience, this topic is especially close.
The story of Lem is not only a story of literature. It is a story of Jewish Lviv, a story of assimilation, a story of survival, and a story of silence after the experienced catastrophe. Therefore, such meetings are important not only for those who love science fiction but also for everyone who tries to understand how the memory of the past continues to live in culture.
Jewish origin and the shadow of the Holocaust
Stanisław Lem came from a Jewish family. His father, Samuel Lem, was a doctor, and his mother, Sabina Woller. The family considered themselves part of Polish culture, lived in a Polish-speaking environment, and were assimilated, but Lem’s origin remained Jewish.
During the Holocaust, the family was under mortal threat. According to the Nazi “Nuremberg laws,” Lem was considered a Jew. He and his parents managed to avoid death thanks to forged documents and living under another identity.
For most Jews of Lviv, that era ended tragically.
That is why the story of Lem’s family is not only the private biography of a famous writer. It is part of the large and painful history of Jewish Lviv, almost destroyed during the Holocaust.
Lem himself rarely spoke openly about his Jewish origin and the experiences he went through after the war. He emphasized that his worldview was formed in the mainstream of Polish culture. But silence about the trauma also became part of his biography.
In recent years, researchers have increasingly noted that traces of the experienced Holocaust could be encrypted in his works — not as direct evidence, but as a deep layer of fear, alienation, the impossibility of fully understanding another, the confrontation of a person with an impersonal force and catastrophe.
At the Hesed program, they talked about this: about new research that helps to read Lem’s works differently.
Behind the fantastic worlds, space expeditions, robots, artificial intelligence, and distant civilizations, one can see not only a play of imagination but also the experience of a person who lived through a century in which civilization showed its terrible reverse side.
For NANews — Israel News, this topic is also important because it connects several lines: the Jewish history of Lviv, the Ukrainian space of memory, Polish culture, and the Israeli question of how to preserve the memory of people whose identity was complex, multilayered, and often traumatized.
A visionary who predicted the digital age
But the evening at Hesed was not only about tragedy.
It was also about the genius of Lem, who managed to see the future long before it became our everyday reality. Participants of the program recalled the technical inventions and phenomena that Lem described in his books: electronic and audiobooks, tablets, smartphones, the internet, virtual forms of communication, automated systems, complex relationships between humans and machines, and information.
Today, when artificial intelligence, the digital environment, smartphones, and a constant flow of data have become part of ordinary life, Lem is read not as a writer of the past, but as an author who continues to ask questions of the present.
What happens to a person when technology becomes smarter?
Can we understand another mind if it thinks differently than we do?
Where does progress end and loneliness begin?
Why does humanity, creating new technologies, often not become wiser?
These questions resonate in “Solaris”, “The Cyberiad”, “The Star Diaries of Ijon Tichy”, “Return from the Stars”, and other works of Lem. And that is why his books remain alive: they do not become obsolete with technology because they speak not only about machines but about humans.
The music of Lviv as part of memory
Musical clips added a special atmosphere to the meeting.
The song “My Heart Remained in Lviv” with lyrics by Marian Hemar — a Polish poet, satirist, playwright, and relative of Stanisław Lem — was played. This detail is important: through Hemar, the conversation about Lem returns to Lviv, to the Polish-Jewish cultural environment, to people for whom the city remained not just a point on the map, but part of personal destiny.
The popular song “Only in Lviv” was also played, and the video sequence was complemented by a film shot in Hesed — “Two Tangos”. These musical inserts made the program not a dry lecture, but a living return to urban memory, where literature, music, streets, and biographies merge into one common story.
Lem, the Lvivian, truly returned to Lviv — in books, in memories, in research, in conversations about him, and in a mural created in his honor.
Why Lem’s story is important today
The story of Stanisław Lem is important not only as an anniversary date.
It helps to talk about how a city preserves people, even when historical catastrophes tear apart families, languages, countries, and destinies. Lem’s Lviv has long ceased to exist in its former form, but it continues to live in literature, memory, and cultural initiatives.
For Ukraine, this story is important as part of Lviv’s multicultural heritage.
For Israel — as part of the Jewish memory of Eastern Europe.
For Polish culture — as the story of one of its great authors.
And for readers of NANews — Israel News — as a reminder that Jewish history does not always speak with a direct voice. Sometimes it is hidden in biography, in silence, in fantasy, in the image of an alien planet, in the impossibility of understanding another, and in the longing for a city that remained inside forever.
Stanisław Lem wrote about the future, but his own life was deeply connected to the past.
He saw technological progress but understood the fragility of humans.
He created cosmic worlds but carried Lviv within him.
That is why the meeting at Hesed became not just a program for the 105th anniversary of the writer, but an important act of memory: about Lem, about Jewish Lviv, about the experienced Holocaust, and about the culture that continues to return people’s names, cities, and stories.